Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

This is one of those handy tools where once you've used it for a while you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. I use this thing everyday for both work projects and my own personal projects.

It allows you to run virtually any Intel processor based operating system as a virtual machine on top of Windows XP or Windows 2000. Its great for testing software on different flavors of Windows OS. Its handy if you want to play around with Linux but don't want to set up a dual boot machine. Its awesome for client/server software development. You can simulate several differnt machines on the same box.

It virutalizes your hardware so the virtual machines see a generic video card, sound card, network card, etc. You can run as many VMs as you have RAM and processing power.

I've sucessfully installed Windows NT, XP, 2000 server, 98, various flavors of Linux, Solaris for Intel and MSDOS as virtual machines on my systems.

You can download a trial version from the link above.

Buy it here from Amazon.com: