>>>>>>What do I need to do to be able to have another environment on my laptop that is totally stripped and has just the most basic windows? I need to be able to boot up or login to a separate Windows session and test EXEs as if I'm our QA dept or on a client PC. Need it to be as unintrusive as possible to my current setup and only need to have a couple things beyond the most basic Windows setup. XP if that matters.
>>>>>
>>>>>Maybe Virtual PC:
>>>>> http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/overview.mspx ?
>>>>>Happy New Year,
>>>>>Viv
>>>>
>>>>I use VMware on my desktop and have Vista running as the guest on it and XP Pro as the host. The main problem I see with a laptop is being able to allocate enough memory to the Virtual PC, unless the laptop already has 3-4 gb of memory. Other than that, it provides a very good testing environment for whatever operating system you want to use.
>>>
>>>I have 4gb on the laptop. I just downloaded VM from MS. Anything I should know about before I start installing it? I've already done a backup of the laptop... :-D
>>
>>Prior to selecting VMware, I downloaded VM from MS, Virtual Box from Sun and the trial version of VMware. The first two are free and VMware cost $189 for their Workstation 6.5.
>>
>>I read reviews on all and VMware got high ratings in all that I read.
>>
>>I installed all of them, one at a time, installing a XP pro guest on each one. The only one that guided me through every step was VMware so I decided on VMware.
>>
>>I did have a minor issue with VMware when I loaded Vista Business as the guest system. VMware only set up a 17 gb disk for Vista and the Vista installation took up 14 gb of space. This didn't leave me enough room so I had to do a lot of Googleing to find out how to increase the size of the disk. It took most of a day to get Vista working initially so I didn't want to have to uninstall/reinstall in order to get the disk size I wanted.
>>
>>All three installations are easy to uninstall if you're not satisfied so just install it and try it out.
>>
>>There was one issue that applied to all three. When you uninstall, they all leave the Virtual Disk files on your hard drive. I think I had three of them at around 5 gb apiece that I had to locate and delete.
>>
>>I love it (VMware). My network sees it as a separate computer so I can test my programs running on both Vista and XP and I can copy and paste between it and the host and any of the networked computers.
>
>Do you think it would work well running two instances of an EXE to test for record contentions and locking, etc?

For that it's simpler to just run two EXEs (or two instances of VFP) on the same OS....
Regards,
Viv