Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

I do a lot of my testing, and some of my development on Virtual PCs. I used to use VMWare, but now I use Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004. The change is due to the cost of the product. I originally used VMWare because they had a student edition for $99. They increased the price a couple years ago, and I managed to get a free copy of Microsoft's Virtual PC about the same time. I think they are both good products. I have heard that VMWare is slightly faster than Virtual PC. But I don't need the fastest product, I happier with a good product, that is cheaper.

A few tips on using Virtual PC...

1. Use a seperate virtual disk to host the page file.
2. Defragment your hard drive using this program from this site. You only need the Defrag.exe file on your Virtual PC. Then you can run the defragmenter using this command line "defrag -d c:", where c is the drive to be defragmented.
3. Pre-Compact the hard drive using the Virtual Disk Pre-Compactor that is included in Virtual PC Service Pack 1
4. Run the "Virtual Disk Wizard" and Compact the hard drive.