Connectix Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and Windows Virtual PC are successive versions of the same software. Versions of Virtual PC by Microsoft runs on several versions of Windows, beginning with Windows 2000 in Virtual PC 2004 and later Windows XP in Virtual PC 2007 onwards. These older versions were still available and support operating systems older than Windows XP. Windows Virtual PC only runs on Windows 7 and only supports versions of Windows beginning with Windows XP. Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft replaced Virtual PC with
Hyper-V.
Virtual PC by Connectix Virtual PC version 3 in
Mac OS 9, running a
Brazilian Portuguese edition of
Windows 95 Virtual PC was originally developed as a Macintosh application for
System 7.5 and released by Connectix in June 1997. The first version of Virtual PC designed for Windows-based systems, version 4.0, was released in June 2001. Virtual PC 4 was the first version with expandable drive images. Connectix sold versions of Virtual PC bundled with a variety of guest operating systems, including Windows,
OS/2, and
Red Hat Linux. As virtualization's importance to enterprise users became clear, Microsoft took interest in the sector and acquired Virtual PC and
Virtual Server (unreleased at the time) from Connectix in February 2003. Under agreement with Connectix, Innotek GmbH (makers of
VirtualBox, now part of
Oracle) ported version 5.0 to run on an OS/2 host. This version also included guest extensions (VM additions) for OS/2 guests, which could run on Windows, OS/2 or Mac OS X hosts using Virtual PC versions 5, 6 or 7. A new version of the guest extensions was later included with Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004.
Microsoft Virtual PC OS
Knoppix On July 12, 2006, Microsoft released Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for Windows free of charge, however the Mac version remained a paid software. The equivalent version for Mac, version 7, was the final version of Virtual PC for Mac. It ran on
Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later for
PowerPC and was a
proprietary commercial software product. Virtual PC 2007 was released only for the Windows platform, with public
beta testing beginning October 11, 2006, and production release on February 19, 2007. It added support for
hardware virtualization, "undo disks", transfer statistic monitor for disk and network, and viewing virtual machines on multiple monitors and support for Windows Vista as both host and guest. The
Windows Aero interface is disabled on Windows Vista guests due to limitations of the emulated video hardware; however, Aero effects can be rendered by connecting to the guest via
Remote Desktop Services from an Aero-enabled Windows Vista host, provided that the guest is running Windows Vista Business or a higher edition. It initially did not support home editions of Windows as host OSes such as Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium, however a hotfix for Virtual PC 2007 SP1 issued on February 20, 2009 (see below) rectified this. Windows XP Starter,
Windows XP Media Center Edition and Windows Vista Starter is not supported on Virtual PC 2007, however the former and the latter are still supported as a guest OS. Support for Windows 2000 Professional as a host OS was dropped in Virtual PC 2007 and will not install at all on Windows 2000 hosts, however it is still supported as a guest OS. "Undo disks" make it possible to revert virtual machines' state to an earlier point by storing changes into a separate .vud file since the last save to the main .vhd file, which can be used for
experimenting. The VHD file acts as a
snapshot. The undo disk file (.vud) incrementally stores changes made by the virtual machine compared to the main
Virtual hard disk drive (VHD) image, which can be applied or discarded by the user. If deactivated, changes are directly written to the VHD file. On May 15, 2008, Microsoft released Virtual PC 2007 Service Pack 1, which added support for both Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7 as guest and host OSes, as well as
Windows Server 2008 Standard as a guest OS. A
hotfix rollup for Virtual PC 2007 SP1, released February 20, 2009, solved networking issues and enhanced the maximum screen resolution to 2048×1920 (32-bit), enabling 16:9 resolutions such as 1920×1080. It also added official support for Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium as both guest and host OSes. A security update was released on July 14, 2009, to address an elevation of privilege vulnerability in guest operating systems. Microsoft Virtual PC (2004 and 2007) does not work at all on Windows 10 64-bit, and even on 32-bit platforms lack internet connectivity due to the lack of the VPC driver. This also impacts
Windows Mobile emulators.
Windows Virtual PC Windows Virtual PC entered public beta testing on April 30, 2009, and was released alongside Windows 7 on July 22, 2009. Unlike its predecessors, it supports only Windows 7 host operating systems. • USB support and redirection – connect peripherals such as flash drives and digital cameras, and print from the guest to host OS
printers. However, USB
isochronous transfer mode is not supported Other methods involve simply just treating an active drive letter from a USB flash drive as a virtual hard drive. • Seamless application publishing and launching – run
Windows XP Mode applications directly from the Windows 7 desktop • Support for
multithreading – run multiple virtual machines concurrently, each in its own thread for improved stability and performance •
Smart card redirection – use smart cards connected to the host • Integration with
Windows Explorer – manage all VMs from a single Explorer folder (%USERPROFILE%\Virtual Machines)
Removed features • The Virtual Machine console is replaced by an integrated
Virtual Machines shell folder. Several options from the console have been removed such as
Restore at start, CPU time performance settings, muting sound in inactive virtual machines, full-screen resolution related options, configuring the host key, mouse capture options and settings for requiring administrator permissions. • Official guest support for operating systems earlier than Windows XP Professional • Drag-and-drop file sharing between the guest and the host • Direct sharing of folders between host and guest operating system (Only volumes may be shared between operating systems) • Ability to commit changes in undo disks upon turning off virtual machines (Doing so is now only possible through virtual machine
Settings dialog box) • Ability to use physical and virtual Parallel ports • User interface controls for using virtual
floppy disks (Virtual floppy disk functionality, however, is still supported and may be accessed using a
script) • Virtual PC additions for guest operating systems no longer supported have been removed. However, installing Virtual Machine Additions from an older Microsoft virtualization product works for some guest OSes. • Properties of the virtual machine, like guest OS, processor, processor features, video mode, video RAM, code cache, IDE controller reads and writes, Ethernet reads and writes, video frame rate and command line options can no longer be viewed.
System requirements System requirements for Windows Virtual PC: • Computer running Windows 7 (all editions except Starter) • 15 GB of hard disk space per virtual Windows environment • Optional: if the processor supports hardware-assisted virtualization technology such as
AMD-V or
Intel-VT, it will be used. Before March 19, 2010, such a processor was mandatory. == Windows XP Mode ==