Today I needed to install extra stuff on my VPC, but it turned out that there was not enough space. Donn Felker blogged a nice article how you can resize your VHD, I followed all the steps and It worked like a charm.

Virtual PC 2007 RC1 has been released, and can be downloaded on the Microsoft Connect site, if you participated in the beta tests. The main new features are:

• Support for Windows Vista™ as a host operating system
• Support for Windows Vista™  as a guest operating system
• Support for 64-bit host operating systems
• Support for hardware-assisted virtualization
• Built-in support for network installations

More details about the release notes can also be downloaded on the Microsoft Connect site.

Microsoft released the beta program for Virtual PC 2007. The new features are

• Hardware-assisted virtualization
• Support for Windows Vista as a guest and host operating system
• Support for 64-bit host operating system

You can participate on the beta program through the Microsoft Connect web site.

Ubuntu is a free linux-based operating system. Ubuntu works very well on Virtual PC, and I didn't encounter any problems during installation. A detailed step-by-step explanation can be found on the documentation site of Ubuntu, How To - Configure Ubuntu for Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

Setting Ubuntu to the same screen resolution as the host in full-screen mode didn't worked for me. I tried the following post, but without any success.

One of the reasons for installing Ubuntu, was to see if my blog site rendered correctly in Firefox. Only the line under the post title was not positioned correctly. I will update the 'business' theme soon.

Here are some interesting blogs that are dedicated to Virtual PC

• VirtualMachine
• Dugie's Pensieve
• Virtual PC Guy

There are some fundamental features in Virtual PC that you really have to look at. For example differencing disks, see HOWTO: Use Virtual PC's Differencing Disks to your Advantage and you can also compress your VHD files, see Compact Your VHD Files.

Tip

On several keyboard layouts and for example on a AZERTY belgian keyboard you need the [Alt Gr] key for the backslash, square brackets, etc. Inside Virtual PC the [Alt Gr] key doesn't work, therefore you can use an alternative for the [Alt Gr] key, which is [Ctrl] + [Alt].

Update:

There is a hotfix now for the ALTGR problem.