Ask Felgall

After mentioning yesterday about people buying computers with Vista and then reformatting to install XP, the relative difficulty of installing operating systems was the next thing that occurred to me.

The main reason why people run Windows rather than other operating systems is because Windows comes pre-installed on their new computer and so they do not have to go through the relatively complicated process of actually installing an operating system and getting it to work with their hardware. At least that applies to those who buy computers with XP installed,, those with Vista installed who decide to revert back to XP still have the problem of doing the Windows XP install themselves or getting someone to do it for them.

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Some time ago I downloaded and installed Microsoft Virtual PC. Given that the computer that I have Windows XP running on is the least powerful of the computers that i regularly use and given what a memory hog that XP itself is, I didn’t hold out much hope for being able to install anything worthwhile into the Virtual PC but I thought that it was at least worth a look.

Surprisingly, apart from the fact that it ran extremely slowly (and I mean go away and come back half an hour later to see if the screen has changed at all yet - that slow), my attempt to install OS/2 version 4 into the virtual PC was quite successful at least past the first reboot (formatting the virtual hard drive) and second reboot (after installing the presentation manager). Unfortunately, things were running so slowly once it started to open the OS/2 desktop that there seemed little point in continuing with the install but i was impressed that the install actually got that far given the hardware that I have in that particular computer.

Microsoft Virtual PC certainly looks like something that may be extremely useful for me to use the next time that I buy a new computer. For running multiple operating systems on one computer at the same time this free software from Microsoft looks like a great product (who said I never have anything good to say about Microsoft?).