The PC I have at work is running both Xp and Vista. I have software that only runs in Xp so I need to switch back and forth a lot. Right now in order to do so I have to restart and boot into Xp. Needless to say it’s a pain and inefficient.
I found info on a program called Virtual PC 2007. What I am wondering is how well this program works (or previous versions of it) and issues about stability.
Does anyone have experience using programs like these?
It works quite well; we have used it on a couple of machines at work. One thing to be aware of is that it is quite a resource hog. You may be running a virtual PC, but you need actual system resources in order to run it. If you want to have decent performance (for either the host or the guest OS) make sure you have enough memory to support both operating systems, plus all of the applications running in both. With your configuration, I’d suggest 2 GB as a minimum.
As long as you have the horsepower, you should be OK.
I use it all the time. It’s great when you want to install software for test, but don’t want to screw up your computer. I’m currently testing out some software that can wipe your hard drive if the computer is stolen, and a virtual machine lets me do that with a minimum of inconvenience.
It required a good deal of memory and on your hard drive (simple virtual hard drives are 6 Gigs or more), but otherwise it a nice tool.
I have 46 GB of free space, that should be plenty 
My system info:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600* 2.81 GHz
Memory: 3071 MB
System Type: 64-bit OS
Your system should be fine (as long as you are not running anything too intensive).
You have choices for your Virtual machine software, too - VMWare (you can use the free player if you don’t mind a bit of work setting it up), Virtual PC, VirtualBox.
You could run the XP session directly from your existing partition, but I would suggest a clean XP build into a vm.
Si
I believe there are EULA issues for some versions of Vista that forbid running it in a virtual machine.
I read that too while I was searching for info on a virtual setup. I would be running virtual xp in vista.
I believe Suburban Plankton was referring to physical memory, not hard drive space. You apparently have 3 gigs of memory, which should be more than enough to run one virtual machine.
We use VPC 2007 all the time for software development. Solid, reliable & about as efficient as a virtual environment can be.
VPC itself isn’t such a hog, but understand that when the guest VM is runing, your hardware is running two OSes at once with two OSes worth of overhead. In short, do not expect to set speed records.
If you just want the XP VM for a particular purpose, i.e. running that one special program, consider really stripping down the XP OS. Disable every service you don’t absolutely need, do not run desktop search, firewall, AV or any of the other startup “convenienceware”. You really want just the minimum case Windows UI & your app running in the VM.
Note that a malware infection on the VM is just as dangerous as the same infection on a physical machine in terms of its ability to spread on your network. So even though the VM is in some sense disposable, the stuff it can touch is not. Practice hygiene appropriate to the risk. My advice to strip the protection from the VM assumes the VM NEVER connects to the internet.
Consider storing the data used by your XP-only program not on the XP VM’s virtual hard disk but rather in a folder on the host Vista box. That way if the VM does get trashed, you can wipe it without losing any data. You can access the host data via network share or the VM extensions.
I always forget about the difference between hard drive and memory… seems all the same to me :o
This is a good point. If/when we set this up, I will recommend this.
Thanks for all the help!