Virtual PC Confusion

I've been running Virtual PC 2007 (SP1) on my Win7 Home Premium for some
time now in order to be able to run a copy of Linux Mint, XP & Win98.

Recently became aware of what appears to be an updated VM environment
for Win7. It appears to be named "Windows6.1-KB958559-x86-
RefreshPkg.msu" (and a 63 bit version also) and requires validation
before downloading. It states it's for Win7 Home Premium as well as
other OS's.

What's the difference between them? Will it give me an "enhanced" VM
environment where USB is passed thru to the VM? If I install it can I
just "pick up" my existing VM's? Should I first uninstall WPC 2007?

pjp wrote:

I've been running Virtual PC 2007 (SP1) on my Win7 Home Premium for some
time now in order to be able to run a copy of Linux Mint, XP & Win98.

Recently became aware of what appears to be an updated VM environment
for Win7. It appears to be named "Windows6.1-KB958559-x86-
RefreshPkg.msu" (and a 63 bit version also) and requires validation
before downloading. It states it's for Win7 Home Premium as well as
other OS's.

What's the difference between them? Will it give me an "enhanced" VM
environment where USB is passed thru to the VM? If I install it can I
just "pick up" my existing VM's? Should I first uninstall WPC 2007?



Windows Virtual PC is intended for system's whose CPU supports
virtualization. It's meant to replace VPC 2007.

From the download page -
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...s.aspx?id=3702

" Supported Operating System

Windows 7

Processor: Intel®, AMD®, VIA® processors capable of
hardware-assisted virtualization, with the setting turned on in the BIOS. "

As for performance, I've never used it as my CPU does not support
virtualization.
It only supports "reality based applications".


MowGreen
================
*-343-* FDNY
Never Forgotten
================

MowGreen wrote:
pjp wrote:

I've been running Virtual PC 2007 (SP1) on my Win7 Home Premium for some
time now in order to be able to run a copy of Linux Mint, XP & Win98.

Recently became aware of what appears to be an updated VM environment
for Win7. It appears to be named "Windows6.1-KB958559-x86-
RefreshPkg.msu" (and a 63 bit version also) and requires validation
before downloading. It states it's for Win7 Home Premium as well as
other OS's.

What's the difference between them? Will it give me an "enhanced" VM
environment where USB is passed thru to the VM? If I install it can I
just "pick up" my existing VM's? Should I first uninstall WPC 2007?



Windows Virtual PC is intended for system's whose CPU supports
virtualization. It's meant to replace VPC 2007.

From the download page -
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...s.aspx?id=3702

" Supported Operating System

Windows 7

Processor: Intel®, AMD®, VIA® processors capable of
hardware-assisted virtualization, with the setting turned on in the
BIOS. "

As for performance, I've never used it as my CPU does not support
virtualization.
It only supports "reality based applications".


MowGreen
================
*-343-* FDNY
Never Forgotten
================


One difference, between VPC2007 and Windows Virtual PC, is the
former has a "nice GUI" for controlling the setup, whereas the
latter has a dreadful "Windows 7 look and feel" interface for the
same function. You can hardly figure out where your VM went. As
a test, I think I tried running some Linux VM in there.

It's bad enough, I uninstalled Windows Virtual PC from my Windows 7
laptop.

Windows Virtual PC, also supports running WinXP Mode. To do that,
it had support for Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Protocol
added. That allows seamless operation of a WinXP staged program,
as a window floating around in the Windows 7 desktop. If you
were doing that from VPC2007, you would have a window drawn around
the entire WinXP desktop, and all programs would appear inside
that desktop view. Whereas, with Windows Virtual PC + WinXP Mode (500MB
download), you get WinXP programs mixing with Windows 7 programs,
on the desktop. And the windows are drawn as if they were from a
"remote session".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC

On VPC2007, hardware virtualization support via VT-D/AMD-V was optional.
You could enable or disable that on a per-VM basis. This caused no
end of problems with Linux VMs, because they would test for this,
from inside the VM. And because the code was buggy as hell, they'd
crash. The latest Linux abortion, was incorrecting identifying
VPC2007 as Hyper-V, looking for Hyper-V disk drivers, finding none,
and then refusing to access any virtual hard drives in the Linux VM.
That took a whole year for them to fix, and is just starting to
trickle out as a bug fix.

On Windows Virtual PC, according to the above Wikipedia article, the
initial release of the software required VT-X/AMD-V. But apparently
that was relaxed somehow.

"System requirements for Windows Virtual PC

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."

And the latest snafu, is on Windows 8, they include a copy of
Hyper-V for free (replacement for virtual pc series of software).
But it requires SLAT, otherwise known as Extended Page Tables.
And I don't have any processors here with that. When I tried
to install Hyper-V, it failed silently, and it was only later
I noticed the error message.

So every version of that software that was free, has had some
complicating hardware issue introduced, for no good reason.
The Hyper-V issue is the worst of it, so far (no workaround).

Paul

On Tue, 21 May 2013 10:50:32 -0300, pjp wrote:
Recently became aware of what appears to be an updated VM environment
for Win7. It appears to be named "Windows6.1-KB958559-x86-
RefreshPkg.msu" (and a 63 bit version also) and requires validation
before downloading. It states it's for Win7 Home Premium as well as
other OS's.

Me too. Thanks for bringing that up.

Will it give me an "enhanced" VM
environment where USB is passed thru to the VM?

Yes, and no.
While it has additional features, it also removed support for pre WinXP OSes
such as Windows 9x and DOS. See below links for more info.

What's the difference between them?

Unfortunately, the "Windows Virtual PC: Compare Features" page in Microsoft
website mysteriously disappeared. But you can view the archive from Internet
Archive's Wayback Machine:

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20121...s/compare.aspx

Amazingly, Wikipedia has better information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual...ows_Virtual_PC

If I install it can I just "pick up" my existing VM's?

Well, it should be.

Should I first uninstall WPC 2007?

It's an update package. Download then install.