Virtual PC Guy

rasx wrote:

Is a similar undo feature in Virtual Server 2005?

Yes.

Cheers,
Ben

Winston Pang wrote:

Does Ben address the install time of OS's on the virtual PC? I find that installations in VPC's take much much longer.

Yeah - this is an oft debated topic.  We know that we are the fastest for OS install, and this is largely because most of our performance tuning work has gone into actually using the OS once it is installed.  These happen to be two significantly different usage patterns - and we have not yet spent significant time optimizing the install path - simply because it is something that users do a lot less often than actually 'using' the operating system.

Cheers,
Ben

W3bbo wrote:

Virtual PC Guy wrote: And funny that you should mention Sim City 4 - but it does actually run fine inside of Virtual PC and I am planning to post to my blog about this on Wednesday.

Odd... Considering that you just said that VPC doesn't support 3D, and yet the SimCity4 terrain is in fact just a giant Direct3D-rendered mesh.

So can I play Quake 3 on VPC or not?

Yeah - it threw me too - on the box SimCity 4 says that it needs a D3D 7 compatible card with 32mb of VRAM - yet if you install it inside of Virtual PC it runs just fine.

You can't play Quake 3 inside of Virtual PC - but you can play Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 (as both have software renderers.

Cheers,
Ben

To answer your questions:

1) Yes - it is a toaster (cost me $9), which is actually a violation of Microsoft policy - however I got an exception because I am alergic to wheat (gluten - actually) and can't use communal toasters

2) I believe that it was a contract that I needed to review - however I can't tell you any more than that

3) It should do - we have code to detect and handle polymorphic x86 code (it is used more often than you might guess)

4) Virtual PC 'virtualizes' the processor - so you will get whatever architecture you have on the physical computer (but we only support CPUs of the i686 family).

And funny that you should mention Sim City 4 - but it does actually run fine inside of Virtual PC and I am planning to post to my blog about this on Wednesday.

Cheers,
Ben

While virtual machines don't have 'real' DMA resources - we do have emulated ones for all the usually subsystems (along with emulated IO devices).

While we cannot do 3D graphics today we are able to run Windows XP and other modern operating systems quite well.

Cheers,
Ben