>>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.
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>>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.
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>>Doug
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>Excellent explanation. I am about to purchase a new desktop for home. My current one is 4-1/2 years old, XP, single-core. I plan to use the new one for gaming too so it will be a souped up dual core with 4gb RAM and big disks. Excellent too for VPC.
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>The system will come with Vista preinstalled. I plan to use VPC not only for betas but also so I can share Vista and XP as some of my old software I'm afraid might not work very well with Vista. I have seen Vista demos many times but I do not have it at work and never had a system that could handle it at home.
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>Question: Should I make Vista my main OS and install XP in VPC virtual drives or viceversa?
>[Update]: After thinking about it, I guess that would be the best. It will take a little getting used to but it should be fine.
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>What version of Vista to get is the next quandary. The system comes preinstalled with the lowest version. I do not need the entertainment and home threatre options. As long as I can do networking properly in the home-lan I'm fine.


Alex,

It totally depends what you want to do with the operating system. If you need USB access, etc, the vpc doesn't allow this at this point (VM Ware does support usb access from virtual machine).