I'm continuing to experiment with the Windows 7 Virtual PC.
Using the supplied pre-installed XP, the screen gets set to 1440 x 900, 16 bit colour and no option for changing it.
I created another Virtual XP using the CD that came with my computer. With it, the screen gets set to 1080 x 768, 32 bit colour. Again, there's no option for changing it. Without loading specialized video drivers, I would expect the upper resolution to be limited, but the absence of lower resolution choice was surprising.
As well, once installed, the user name "User" seems to be the default account with administrator privileges. The option of logging on without password entry seems reasonable since one must be already on Windows 7.
Some observations...
Each Windows 7 user gets their own virtual hard drive. This gets initialized when they use Virtual XP for the first time. This .VHD file occupies about 1GB.
The installation creates a 1GB file in the Program Files folder. This file is "owned" by SYSTEM. If it gets deleted, Virtual XP must re-install. It appears that this one file serves multiple users.
In Explorer, Virtual XP sees it's own virtual disk as "C" and all other volumes on the computer appear as network resources. This makes the entire system's files available, yet minimizes confusion.
I ran Task Manager and saw that Virtual XP uses only one processor.
Virtual XP seems a bit recalcitrant when asked to deal with Limited user accounts. It seems "confused" by account passwords, and even more confused by accounts without passwords.
I have a very limited selection of games, but those I tried seemed to play in Virtual XP without compromise.
With Virtual XP, my mouse remains "free." When using Virtual PC with Windows 98, my mouse gets "captured" within the Win98 window and a Ctrl-Alt-Left key combination frees it. I prefer the Virtual XP approach because when I move the mouse past the border, I want it "outside."
In conclusion, I think Virtual PC and Virtual XP work quite well overall. For a Beta version running on a Release Candidate, all seems quite polished.
Cheers, PW. |
