Well, I must say that my first impressions of MS Virtual PC 2004 are mixed. My basis for comparison is an old version of VMWare Workstation and it has been some time since I last ran it. In short, my memory of VMWare is weak at best and a direct comparison will not take place.
The first notible thing for my experience is that I was able to reuse and activate the same Windows XP Pro key that my system is using as the base OS. I was a little surprise, but then I've never taken the time to fully understand the activation rules from MS. After setup and updating the OS, I installed the Virtual Machine Additions for Virtual PC. This loaded an ISO image to the Virtual PC's CD ROM. I know that loading an ISO as an available disk is nothing new, I was happy to see this functionality.Terminal Server seemes to be the closest comparison to the experience of Virtual PC after instaling the VM Additions. Since I consume Terminal Services quite a bit, I felt comfortable with the relation.
Once I had all of the environment setup, I wanted to test the extreme case of copying it to another system (actually, I went from a laptop to a desktop). Since I had allocated 6 GB for the Virtual PC window and I'm limited to 100 megabits, the copy took some time to create. However, to my surprise, the copy was successful and the other installation of Virtual PC was able to open and work in the copied environment. In opening the existing instance, the only thing I had to do was make sure my memory was configured the same (and I might have even been able to change that).
Overall, I think this is a pretty desent solution for my testing purposes. At times the system is pretty slow, but I don't have any basis for comparison and I am quite positive I could tweek my base OS to better accomodate the virtual environment (allow for more memory to focus on background services, etc.).
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