Publisher's Description

Virtual PC 2004, is a Microsoft virtualization suite that allows us to emulate other Operating system. Very effective and efficient if is necessary to have more than one operating system running. You can have Windows 95 or Linux running on your Microsoft XP at the same time without going through the arduous process of making parallel installations or without going through the configuration of a dual boot or even creating a dual boot installation in a virtual machine without affect your base operating system, however other operating systems like Linux may run, but are not officially supported.

It’s virtualizes the operating system using the resources of the computer, creating a hardware list to proceed with the installation. The program can create files that are used as virtual hard drive. It provides multiple configurations and options like the type of operating system that we want to install, components enabling or disabling options, manage the capacity of the virtual hard drive, memory that we want to use, etc.

It is an excellent virtualization suite but it is limited due the physical components, as an example in the case that you only have 1 GB memory ram it can be configure to use 64 MB to 1 GB but this would affect the performance of the host console. If you want to use this virtualization suite my recommendation is to have the proper hardware to support the suite, not the minimum recommended, the necessary for the maximum performance.

Right now Microsoft has Virtual PC 2007 as the last version available but we can mention other virtualization suites like:
* VMware, it has some free versions.
* KVM.
* VirtualBox.
* Xen.
* Bochs.
* QEMU.
* Virtuozzo.
* Mac on Linux.
* Basilisk II.
* SheepShaver.