Virtual PC 2007 Beta Appears

On Tuesday, Microsoft shipped a beta version of Virtual PC 2007 to testers, providing its Virtual PC customers with the first version of the product to natively support Windows Vista. Virtual PC is a virtual machine (VM) environment in which virtual guest operating systems can run in a window under physical host operating systems.

Virtual PC 2007 is a 32-bit application, but it can run under both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows and supports only 32-bit guest OSes. It supports both Intel's and AMD's microprocessor hardware virtualization features and provides dramatically better performance than the current shipping version, Virtual PC 2004. I was told that Virtual PC 2007 will support Windows Vista's Windows Aero user interface, but the current beta only supports the Vista Basic UI.

Microsoft customers who are interested in signing up for the Virtual PC 2007 beta can do so at the Microsoft Connect Web site (URL below). Virtual PC 2007, like its predecessor, will be free when the final version is released early next year.

Virtual PC 2007 Beta Program