Virtual PC 2007 and new Vista migration tools now free Microsoft downloads

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:45

Business IT - Technology

Want to run more than one copy of Windows on your PC, or run an older version while Vista happily hums on your new machine? Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 has been four years in the making, but it’s finally available as a free download - and new free Vista migration tools have appeared too.

Remember Connectix? Their ‘Connectix’ webcam business was ultimately sold to Logitech, while their Connectix Virtual PC software was sold to Microsoft in February 2003. Not long after that, Microsoft release Virtual PC 2004 – and since then, everyone’s been waiting for an upgrade, while VMware and XEN have since dominated the virtualization space.

Now Microsoft is back with all guns firing, continuing to make Virtual PC 2007 free as they did with the SP1 version of with Virtual PC 2004 last July, with the new version available as a free download from Microsoft’s website to boot.

Microsoft has new Vista migration tools available for free download too, including one for businesses that helps them evaluate their existing PC fleets, another to test application compatibility and yet another to help businesses deal with the management of product keys and product activation for large number of computers many IT departments in large businesses need to manage.

So, Virtual PC 2007 is finally here. Billed as potentially the last version of Virtual PC to be released, with future virtualization software likely built into future operating systems, it happily works on the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows XP Pro, Windows Server 2003 and, as expected, Windows Vista – the operating system it is most optimized for.

Key features include:

Support for Windows Vista 64-bit as the host operating system
Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system
AMD-V and Intel VT support (chips that feature hardware virtualization support)
Crucial performance improvements over Virtual PC 2004

Unless you’re running the Windows Vista Enterprise Edition, which includes a license to run up to four additional virtual instances of Vista on a single PC, other Windows operating systems you might want to run will need to be fully licensed copies of Windows, or you will run into Windows Genuine Validation copy-protection issues that will ultimately prevent you from running Vista or XP properly – or at all.

Even so, it’s great to see that Virtual PC 2007 has finally arrived – we’ll certainly be giving it a spin to see how good it is for ourselves.