Slight OT: Virtual PC 2004

Xander wrote on 10/6/2006, 9:38 PM
I noticed today on Microsoft's website, they are now giving away Virtual PC2004 free. They also plan to give away Vista Virtual PC 2007, when it is released, away free.

Testing Vista RC1, it doesn't really surprise me. The fundamentals of the OS are so different, you will be lucky if any previous software you own works on Vista. I read on an earlier post, that someone got Vegas working on Vista! No luck in my case. Photoshop even asks me to register every time I load it up!

I think that for anything to work on Vista, it has to be written for Vista. My Audigy 2 ZS doesn't even work, as the drivers were written for Vista Beta 2 and not Vista RC1.

It wouldn't surprise me if the release of Vista included Virtual PC 2007 as standard, such that the first thing it did, during installation, was capture your OS installation and run that as a Virtual operating system within Vista! That way, you wouldn't get to pi#$ed off that things didn't work.

Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 10/7/2006, 10:04 AM
The world could have been saved a lot of grief is MS had decided a long time ago not to preserve the ability to run software from 1982 on your latest Windows XP machine.

Why? Because we are suffering not only in terms of performance, but in terms of security. Big time.

Nobody thought of security back in 1982, because there was virtually no wide area networking, so all machines on a network were trusted.

Not so today, as you know.

And today, er, tomorrow, Vista. It runs on BIOS.

What is BIOS? The BIOS is not from 1982. It was one of the three components of CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors) written by one guy in 1974.

Do you think it is the latest in technology?

Ummm, no. Think "Apollo 13." Pencil ties and hornrimmed glasses.

MS were originally going to use EFI, a "BIOS for the future," but decided to go back to BIOS because they had so much trouble with the Vista code (I suspect they were replacing the worst parts with working XP code which needed the BIOS, but this is speculation).

At least if you're running XP on a Mac, your running it on EFI...

And what if MS had taken the step I suggested, and somebody really needed to run that 1982 program today? No problem! You'd run it on your IBM PC emulator, and the program would still run about 100x faster than it would have originally...

Steve Mann wrote on 10/7/2006, 11:15 PM
The BIOS is written by the motherboard manufacturer, not Microsoft. The MB manufacturers have been collaborating on a next-gen BIOS and MS is on that committee, but being a working group/committee, it's going to take them ten years to agree on the shape of the meeting room table.

During the CP/M days when Gary Kildall missed becoming "Bill Gates", the BIOS was a folder in the root directory where the hardware I/O drivers were kept. Usually provided by the hardware manufacturer, often modified by the computer owner, and in some cases written by the owner. (I know, I wrote a few).

Steve M.