The product we are working on allows the user to easily set it up to run automatically whenever the computer is started. This is helpful because the product is part of the basic work environment of most of our users. This feature was implemented not so long ago and for a while all was well, but when we started testing this feature on Vis...
How, in general, does one determine if a PC supports hardware virtualization? I use VirtualPC to set up parallel test environments and I'd enjoy a bit of a speed boost. ...
Hey everyone, I'm using Virtual PC and working with a virtual hard disk (*.vhd) that is only sized at 8.2 GB. I would like to double the size to something like 16-20GB. I see options for compacting the VHD but nothing to expand it. It's set to "dynamically expand" but I'm installing some software and it doesn't seem to resize itself to a...
Hi, Is anyone using Virtual PC to maintain multiple large .NET 1.1 and 2.0 websites? Are there any lessons learned? I used Virtual PC recently with a small WinForms app and it worked great, but then everything works great with WinForms. ASP.NET development hogs way more resources, requires IIS to be running, requires a ridiculously l...
Which features and services in Vista can you remove with nLite (or tool of choice) to make a Virtual PC-image of Vista as small as possible? The VPC must work with development in Visual Studio. A normal install of Vista today is like 12-14 GB, which is silly when I got it to work with Visual Studio at 4 GB. But with Visual Studio it to...
I am currently using Windows Server 2008 Standard and have several Hyper V machines. These are development VM's and I want to now switch back Vista x64 because I am missing Aero. I know Windows Server 2008 can have aero but the host performance is very very bad when I run VM in Hyper V. I want to export my Hyper V machines so that I ca...
I develop exclusively on VMs. I currently run Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro and do all my development on a series of Virtual PC VMs for many different environments. This post by Andrew Connell litterally changed the way I work. I'm thinking about switching to Fusion and running everything in OS X but I wasn't able to answer the following q...
I'd like to convert a Parallels Virtual Machine image on my mac into an image usable by Virtual PC 2007. Does anyone know how to do that, or if it is possible? ...
VMWare, VirtualBox or Virtual PC. What are the advantages and or disadvantages of each for a programmer? What is the best for Linux Guest OS, which is the best for Windows Guest OS's? ...
I use Virtual PC to create fresh environments for testing my installer. But I must be doing something wrong because a VPC image with Vista or XP inside is taking around 15GB of disk space (that includes VS2005/S2008 installed in them). To create a new copy for testing I copy and paste the folder that has the .vhd, .vmc and .vsv files i...
I am using VirtualPc 2007 more and more, the one annoyance is "Alt-Tab". What I want is to be able to use alt-tab to iterate through all of the applications in the host pc and virtual(s) as if they were one long list. Is there a setting or program to do this? ...
We recently bought a new rack and set of servers for it, we want to be able to redeploy these boxes as build servers, QA regression test servers, lab re-correlation servers, simulation servers, etc. We have played a bit with VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBox etc, creating a virtual build server, but we came across a lot of issues when we tr...
I know that I can share files using Shared Folders in Virtual PC, but this method seems to have pretty poor performance. Is there another method to share files that provides better performance? (Besides using something other than Virtual PC) Note: I guess this isn't directly programming related, but as a developer who spends all day in ...
I need to detect whether my application is running within a virtualized OS instance or not. I've found an article with some useful information on the topic. The same article appears in multiple places, I'm unsure of the original source. VMware implements a particular invalid x86 instruction to return information about itself, while Virt...
I am putting together a SVN demonstration using a WinXP Virtual PC image, and am unable to see my host machine from within the VPC guest OS. This demo will be performed while disconnected from our LAN, so I installed the Microsoft Loopback adapter on my laptop. In the TCP/IP settings I manually set the IP address to 192.168.3.1 to avoi...
What are the key use cases for the use of virtualization -- that is, running one or more "virtual PCs" using software such as VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC -- for software development? Also -- are there other instances/uses of virtualization that aren't covered by my definition above (use of a tool like MS Virtual PC or VMWare), and t...
I run VPC 2007 on my Vista business laptop with 4 gig RAM. I use VPC to run windows XP and maintain a VS2003 web project. At first everything was great. I assigned the VPC 512MB and did my work as usual. I also run Resharper and Visual SVN. Lately, the act of scrolling in a page causes the CPU to spike above 50, sometimes near 100. ...
I have Virtual PC 2007. I am writing a C# program that will run on the Host and Virtual. It needs to communicate both ways. What is the best way to do this? Can it be done in a way that does not require changing Virtual settings? (the OSs will be XP, Vista, Server 2000 / 2003) ...
Like any other hard disk, virtual hard discs (*.vhd) will suffer from fragmentation. So to keep good performance i guess i have to defrag first the virtual hard disc from within the virtual machine and also the (physical) hard disc the .vhd is stored on. First, are these assumption correct? And second, is there a way to defrag both (v...
I'm running Vista on my laptop, but would like to virtualize Ubuntu so that I can boot it from time to time for my personal use (e.g. running code, testing Linux programs). I tried this with Virtual PC 2007 (I allocated 1G of RAM for Ubuntu), and it was very slow. Should I try Hyper-V instead? (Note: I know very little about virtualizati...