Virtual PC is FREE and is awesome!

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Microsoft wrote a fantastic PC virtualization program and has released it for free.  For those "in the know", virtualization software such as Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare allow you to run "operating systems inside of operating systems".  In other words, I can run Windows 2000 on top of XP or Windows 95 on top of XP.  More information on the Virtualization program can be read about on Virtual PC Guy's Weblog but I think that the best way to learn more about this powerful tool is to download it.

At any rate, I've been playing around with this a little because the website for our Standards of Business Conduct workshop this year requires versions of software that can not be installed on my machine because I'm running beta everything (WMP 11, IE 7, and so forth).  There are a ton of really interesting things you can do with Virtualization and, just to name a few, you could:

  • Set up a LAN on your desktop
  • Write networking applications that you can watch and monitor from your desktop
  • Watch the messages that a PC sends out while surfing the web using a sniffer
  • Set up a sandboxed webserver on a separate image
  • Set up images of virtual pcs, run them from a hard drive, and move your entire pc around with you just by moving the images

There are endless options that you can take here and I'd imagine that given the price (FREE!) people will start playing around some more with Virtualization and will use this more for testing and so forth.  I'm just surprised I haven't heard more about free VPC.