Saturday, August 15, 2009

Virtual PC on Windows 7

I decided to jump in and upgrade to Windows 7, because I keep hearing it’s what Vista should have been. And it’s OK. I think I’m getting too old to get excited about OS upgrades, these days I just get annoyed about what’s been broken.

But today I had need to fire up a virtual machine so launched Virtual PC 2007. It told me it was unable to get the network connection up and running and offered to fix it, but then couldn’t find the location of my setup files. Not to worry I thought, probably the best plan is to just reinstall the whole thing. So I uninstalled then attempted to re-install but was told Virtual PC 2007 doesn’t work on Windows 7 so it refused to install it (even though it was clearly working at least a little bit for me). But then I noticed there was a new version of Virtual PC available that would work on Windows 7. So I downloaded that to try and fix my problem. Unfortunately this new version of Virtual PC requires a CPU that has virtualisation built-in. Sadly my CPU is lacking that feature so I couldn’t install this new version.

So if you have Windows 7 and a CPU that doesn’t have the right features then you are basically stuffed. I have managed to get round the problem by rolling back my Windows installation a couple of days using System Restore. Virtual PC 2007 seems to work fine except for the lack of network support, but if you don’t already have Virtual PC installed then you will be somewhat stuck.

No comments: