Any Guidance?

I have XP Home, Vista Premium, Virtual PC 2004 and 2007. I'm just about to clean my HDD and install everything afresh.

I've read on the MS site that Virtual PC won't work with either XP Home or Vista Premium yet other forums seem to think there's no problem.

I was thinking of installing XP Home on the first partition, then Vista on the next partition, then setting up a virtual PC on another partition but wasn't sure whether to run this from XP Home or Vista.

Any guidance/experience would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Vino,

I've also read that VPC won't work on XP home, yadda yadda yadda. It installed fine on my XP home. However, I wasn't able to install Vista inside VPC...had to put Vista on a new physical partition. Windows 95 and XP installed perfect on VPC. VPC shouldn't need it's own partition if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly. My VPC is running from my C: partition (XP).

Haven't tried installing/running VPC from my physical Vista installation though...so unsure about that one.

Also...I'm running VPC 2004. Haven't fooled around with 2007.

Thanks markamus

I was thinking of having the virtual PC on a separate partition so I could take an image (Acronis) and re-install it as and when required. I was also thinking that I could load and image both XP and Vista as a VPC. "Hah!" I hear everyone say... oh well, I'll give it a try anyway

No problem Vino.

VPC uses virtual hard drives, stored as *.vhd, not physical drives. So essentially, you would just be saving the hard drive file to a separate partition, which in turn only saves a little hard drive space in the end.

There's a lot of good info here for MS VPC 2004:
http://www.goodells.net/virtualpc/index.htm

I also read how everyone laughed about trying to run VPC from a physical XP Home installation...never had any problems out of it myself. (well, aside from not being able to install Vista on a VHD)

Have some fun playing with it....it's quite interesting. I even had Linux in my VHD list for a while, but then it made me decide to also go with a physical installation of Linux as well (triple booting )

Regardless, let me know how it turns out. I'm interested to see other's luck with it.

VPC 2007 is specifically designed to run Vista as a Host or as a Guest OS
That is listed as the main difference vis-a-vis VPC 2004.

Hi askey

So do you think I should run XP as the Host and Guest with VPC04 then Vista as the Host and Guest on VPC07?

Unless you have a screamer of a machine, the speed penalty with running Vista as a Guest OS may be too severe if you plan to use Vista a lot.

Partly dependent on whether you have important apps you can't run on Vista, or whether you have that all sorted.

Overall, I would try to run the OS I would use the most as the Main one, the other as VPC Guest.

Just one opinion, with no experience yet. Asking myself the same questions.