Hi Charles.

>I think my confusion is that I always see Virtual PC talked about for testing different operating systems but I'm not quite clear on how to implement it when you want the same operating system, but just a testbed for beta software.

As Eric states, VPC is just a PC within a PC. Think of it as a separate machine, except it just so happens to live on the same hardware. A file on your system holds the virtual hard drive for a particular VPC, making it easy to copy to another system or clone it. For example, I have a bunch of VPCs set up: a clean (ie. nothing else installed) Vista, a clean XP, Vista with various things installed, XP with various things installed, etc. To create a new VPC, I just copy the files for one of the clean VPCs to a new folder, then tell the Virtual PC manager about the new VPC.

I was a little bit nervous about using at first too, but it's really a piece of cake to implement. Give it a try; you'll wonder why you waited.

Doug