Today I installed the Trial version of Microsoft’s brand new product Virtual PC 2004 (formally Connectix.) So far, I am super impressed with this product. What an awesome tool this is. VPC creates a “software computer” that you can use just like it is a seperate computer from your real computer only it runs right on top of the operating system. What that means is, I can install other operating systems on top of Windows XP (or 2000) and use both at the same time. Obviously this slows things down a little bit but for 99% of the stuff that I do, it works perfectly. I have a real copy of the software coming in about a week but the trial lasts for 45 days so I figured that I would download it and gets cracking on it before it actually arrived.
Virtual PC 2004 is really easy to use. I can’t believe how easy they made it and how well it works (so far.) It is like you have a little monitor, right there on your desktop and you can watch the computer start up and you can boot off of CD or floppy or anything you want. It is really awesome. You can even save an ISO image to your desktop (an ISO is the filetype that you use to burn a CD from) and you can tell VPC to use that image instead of the CD drive and it can boot from there. That is about the handiest feature ever. It makes it so easy to try out new software and operating systems it isn’t even funny.
I did a bit of work today attempting to move stuff over from the web server that we have been using to the new one that we are switching to. I want to get things switched over quickly because I want to be able to shut some computers down. There are too many computers running here right now and three of them are not needed but I have to port over the applications that they are using before I can turn them off. I need the space and the quiet, not to mention all the electricity that they are using.