Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Experience
Yesterday I downloaded the newly released Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, installed it, and then went on to install Windows Vista Home Premium on the virtual machine (and contrary to some beliefs, the license for Home Premium does not say that you cannot install it in a virtual machine, but say that you cannot have it installed as the host and then use the same key for the virtual machine).
The host machine has an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.4 GHz) processor with 1 GB DDR RAM. Now this is an old processor with 3D Now! and SSE instructions, none of the newer instructions and none of the hardware virtualization features. Now, with that out of the way, I have to say that installing Windows Vista was the longest, slowest process I’ve ever had in a virtual machine. In contrast to this, installing Windows Vista on the free VMWare Server was very fast and easy.