Soon after VMWare released their virtual server technology, free of charge, Microsoft quickly gave away Virtual PC 2004 with Service Pack 1, as a free download. Now Microsoft have gone one stage further and have launched their latest version, Virtual PC 2007, as another free download.

Virtual technology enables you to run other operating systems on your computer. For instance, instead of trying and testing software on your computer, why not install a virtual PC for this purpose? This means that you can freely install as much software as you wish, without the installation affecting your everyday computer – you can decide what software you like to use, before you install on your computer, for real.

Virtual technology has other benefits, such as enabling a software developer to test their software, on different operating systems, before release. For instance, there’s no reason why you can’t host a copy of Windows Me, Windows 2000 and another copy of Windows XP, for testing purposes.

With virtual technology, you can simply switch back to a previous state. You can install your virtual operating system and save the current state (ie the current installation) and then switch back to that, at a later date, if your virtual operating system becomes unstable.

Virtual PC 2007 enables you to host Windows Vista as a virtual operating system.

This is the new SP1 version of Virtual PC 2007.