Thread: Versions of Vista and Virtual PC

When discussing the pros and cons of the various versions of Vista (in the past issue), you said that the only real difference between Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate is that includes the networking stuff from the business editions. Home users do not need those features, especially as they add Rs. 3,971 to the cost of the operating system. The thing is, I want to run XP as well so that I can use older software, games in particular. I went to download and install Virtual PC from the Microsoft website. They say you need Ultimate to run Virtual PC, something you didn't mention in your article. Is there anything I can do?

There are more differences between Vista Home (Basic or Premium) and Vista Ultimate, but almost all of them are only really useful for busines or specialist users, While Virtual PC says that it won't run on Vista Home Premium, it actually will- you just need to ignore the warning notice that you'll see when you try to run it. That's not the kind of advice we'd normally give, but in this specific case we have tested the software and found no untoward effects when running Virtual PC under Vista Home Premium.

The only thing we'd point out is that Windows XP is likely to run very slowly indeed inside Virtual Pc. That's because the computer is effectively running two operating systems at once, Vista and XP, and both take a fairly large toll on the computer's processing power, which will mean that anything you try to run in the virtual PC will run quite slowly, It's worth a try, but be prepared for performance problems, Also, remember that you'll need a valid licence key to install Windows XP in the virtual Pc.