Someone Else

Can Windows Vista install in a Virtual PC

• But you'll need to create a partition on your virtual disk with another OS installer or FDISK type program in order to create a partition before installing Vista (Win 98 Virtual Floppy with FDISK right here, ain't I good to you?)
• Virtual PC won't mount the ISO image directly, so burn it to a DVD.
• Allocate a lot of RAM. Really.
• Next, the install process will be V  E  R  Y    S   L   O   W (imagine the spaces there meant I went and drank a cup of coffee in-between typing each letter, to show you how slow it will be).
• Colin Barnhorst reports a 12 hr install in Virtual PC and poor performance afterwards, with far better performance in Virtual Server.
  
• My virtual install took far less than Colin's install but still took far too long.
• Performance is slow in Virtual PC 2004 at the moment. I've also tried it on a "real" computer and it isn't great there at the moment, to be honest.
• Remember that this is very much a "work in progress" and should by no means be taken as indicative of a finished product; whatever your opinion is of Windows XP, I can assure you that the very first beta build I saw of "Windows Whistler" was much much much worse than that!

as an FYI, instead of burning a DVD, which I didn't do given that this is a pretty early beta and I would rather not lose an entire 4.5 gb to a 2.7 iso, you can mount the iso with Daemon Tools and install from there. Virtual PC thinks it's a regular hardware type CD ROM and installation proceeded just fine. Sure took a long time though. Thanks for the tip about the extensions. I wondered how I was gonna get it to look better!

Thanks, thats a very good idea there that I missed - all the more annoying when I actually have Alcohol 120% installed that offers the same kind of virtual DVD drive!