Hello there again, you’re friendly geek Ben here, here to bring you the good news: Microsoft has just released Virtual PC 2004 to the internet for free. If you don’t know what Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 is, it’s basically what the name says, it’s a virtual computer. Virtual computers let you run two or more operating systems simultaneously, side by side. This is great for if you need to test programs under different operating systems, or just to play around with different OSes without repartitioning your main machine. Microsoft released Virtual Server 2005 for free, but now they have released the Virtual PC 2004 software, so now there is a free version which isn’t designed for running on a server.

Like many, I had mixed feelings about this latest announcement.

Firstly: It’s great to see Microsoft giving out free software. Everybody loves free stuff, and a saving of $219 really arouses my hip-pocket nerve. Now we can all freely get VPC and set up a secondary system for trying dodgy software out on. It’s quite an interesting move, Microsoft seems to have started releasing a lot of free stuff over the last year. I’m talking mainly here about Visual Studio Express Editions, MSDN Express, SQL Server Express, not to mention all of this beta stuff, Vista, IE 7, Office 2007, etc. Now I’m just waiting for Microsoft to combine VPC, Virtual Server, Visual Studio Express, SQL Server and all of their WinFX/.NET 3.0 SDKs onto one big ISO image to make a big free developer kit. That would be *awesome* … ly convenient.

Second thought: there could be another side to the cookie: Remember that Virtual PC’s biggest competitor is VMWare Workstation. VMWare Workstation has a number of advantages over VPC, for example the emulation is faster, there are tabs, it’s very configurable, and more. However, now that Virtual PC is free, will VMWare Workstation suffer a loss in their client base? Considering that Virtual PC is free, and VMWare Workstation is about $200. Some people could say this is kind of like how Microsoft Internet Explorer became so popular: people could get to it a lot easier than they could get Netscape or Opera or the other browsers of the time. Hopefully VMWare Workstation won’t die a terrible death because of VPC being free … I like VMWare Workstation a bit more than VPC (sorry Microsoft :P) but if I can use VPC for free, I’ll use that.

Anyway, enough waffle, go and get it at microsoft.com/virtualpc and start emulating machines for free

–Ben

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Computing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.