The Vista-compatible version of Microsoft's virtualisation software, Virtual PC 2007, has just come out of beta and is available for free download. Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition can be the host operating systems: XP Home and Media Center owners are out of luck. A 64-bit version is also available. The download button on the front page seems to have the wrong link - you need to go to the Microsoft Download Centre

The big difference from Virtual PC 2004 is the support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system. We've been running the beta of Virtual PC 2007 for a while now, and it works fine, although there's no support for DirectX so you can't run Vista's Aero theme or 3D games. Pretty well any x86-based OS can be installed, including of course Linux. Oddly, on the site Microsoft has a lot of references to the fact that you can run OS/2 Warp on it. Hmmm...

If you want a pleasant experience, though, the more memory you can allocate to the virtual machine, the better - we wouldn't recommend anything less than 1GB of Ram for Windows Vista as a guest OS.

Kelvyn Taylor