Ari’s Blog

In my line of work I end up installing a huge amount of crap software on my PC. I try out different utilities. I install programs to reproduce problems. I try to uninstall these programs but often I forget. Sometimes there is no uninstaller, and sometime programs don’t completely uninstall. This leads to PC clutter. This clutter uses disks space, can cause slower boot time, and slower performance in general.

My solution is virtual PC’s. I use VMWare’s Player to run virtual machines. VMware Player is a free utility that emulates a PC on your PC. VMWare allows you to run a virtual computer (Down to the boot and BIOS) as software under your existing Operating System.

VMWare Player runs on Windows and Linux. You could have Windows running in a virtual machine that is running on Linux. You could have Windows running on a virtual machine that is running on Windows.

VMware Player is great – but it has one major limitation – You can not create a new image with it. You can download ready made images of Linux systems to run – but you are out of luck as far as windows goes. So how do we get a windows virtual PC? There are 2 ways I know of how to do this for free. One is to use Qemu. Qemu is a cool software but not very user friendly. If you would like to use QEMU – there is an in depth article here -
http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/10/26/vmware-player-windows-xp.html

The second way is to use Microsoft Virtual PC. Virtual PC is commercial software BUT there is a fully functional 45 day Eval that you can use to create a windows image. Once you create your image you can import it into VMWare Player and use it as long as you like for free.

You can download MS Virtual PC from:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx

Of course to install windows you will need a windows license.

Now once you have your Image setup – It is critical you make a copy of it. This will allow you to use the image as a virtual playground. When it gets messed up you just erase the Virtual Machine you are using and copy over the original image from your backup.

Of course there are other uses for Virtual Machines. Some use it for QA work, others for secure browsing. I like it as an isolated sand box.

Remember – Next time you download some neat looking software Install on a Virtual Machine before you try it on your real environment.