Recently I decided I needed to try out Vista at home but not on exisitng hardware as I like to keep production machines stable (lol) so I researched a report I had seen online about using Virtual PC 2007 and the Vista Enterprise VHD image provided by Microsoft. I was pleasantly surprised about the speed of the download about 3 hours (thanks to Virgin Media's peak time traffic shaping, cheers Virgin!) and the speed of the speed of the install and the performance of Vista once up and running..
My hardware consists of the following:
- Dell Inspiron 6000 with a
- Celeron M 1.4Ghz processor
- 2Gb of DDR2 ram
- 60Gb Toshiba SATA HDD
- Windows XP Home
- A Western Digital 120Gb Passport USB HDD
I installed the 5Gb Image to my external HDD and ran it from there. Specification of the Virtual PC was:
- 768Mb of memory
- Priority to the Virtual Machine
- All the remainder of the settings as per default
Upon loading the image, had to run the remainder of the config but was up in Vista within 15 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of my PC both in the host OS and the guest OS. However this was a clean version with all the defaults, nothing extra. If I load it up with Office, Internet progs and other tools this may slow it down. The VHD image is locked at 20 days use and is used primarily for IT departments to test the OS before a rollout. I found it very useful in the two days I have used it and may plump to install it after the final beta is closed (ie at SP1 LOL)
J.
