When you installed Virtual PC 2007, I know everyone installed their favorite operating system but that is a mistake. The first thing you should do is prepare your host operating system.
The Minimal Host for Virtual PC 2007 should have.
256mb ram
a P3 processor (P4 or newer recommended)
200gig hard drive or larger
with at least 100gigs of free space.
Windows XP pro sp3 or newer Windows
My Host System with Virtual PC 2007
512mb of ram
P4 3.06ghz
500gig Hard Drive
With 400gigs of free space
Windows XP Pro sp3
A low end host System for Virtual PC 2007
128mb ram
P3 400 MHz or faster (1 GHz recommended) processor with L2 cache
100gig hard drive
50gigs of free space
Windows 2003 Server
That would probably work okay but I don’t recommend it. you need a system with at least 256mb of ram and a 1.0ghz or faster processor the more ram the better as well as hard drive space.
Once you have chosen your best host computer, you need to chose a version of windows that is still supported by Microsoft as you main Guest operating system . So you can update it. Also one that validates with Microsoft for the other important downloads as well as updates for the other unsupported windows like 98 . And not the same one as your host system. This leaves you a few good and bad choices.
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 is the best choice & most stable.
Windows 2003
Windows XP Home
Windows 2003 server
Windows 2008 server
Windows Vista
Windows NT 4.0 though it is still supported is the bad choice because it doesn’t support fat32 or a large hard drive. Even with ntfs you still want get any where.
I chose Windows 2000 Professional.
Because It supports fat32 and has compatible NTFS drive support that will match XP.
Why do you need a main Guest operating system. It’s very simple you can use it to download updates for all your other Virtual Machines, then attach their Virtual Hard Disk and copy everything you need on to them then exit reconfigure run and update your unsupported operating systems.
Another important thing to do when setting up your main Guest system is to lie when creating the Virtual Machine like when I setup windows 2000 I told the Virtual Machine Wizard that I was going to install Windows 2003 Server because it makes the guest system use higher end components for windows 2003, and defaults to 256mb of ram and a 65gig hard drive, though I adjusted the hard drive to 35gigs left the memory at default though. So by telling a lie I’m running Windows 2000 on a P4 3.06ghz guest system, Same as my host processor..
For unsupported Guest operating systems like Windows 3.x, NT 3.x, 9x, 98, and ME. You need to search the internet with your main guest system and find drivers for the virtual PC 2007 devices for whatever system and download them on to a slave Virtual Hard Disk that is formatted for the intended system.
The drivers you need are.
S3 Video Drivers preferably updated ones.
Soundblaster 16 or compatible drivers
And Ethernet Drivers for those systems
and in some cases a TcIP protocol driver win3.x
A good site to start at is
Lightspeed’s reference page
http://oldfiles.org.uk/lightspeed/m…
That should get you up and running your favorite operating system with the best available efficiency. Results my vary.. Best of luck.
Note: that I am assuming that you know how to setup your network devices in all those systems and know what format virtual hard drive you need for whatever system you chose. This is not for beginners.
One More thing Virtual Machine Addictions do not install them because it installs a crappier video driver that will mess up your video settings, if you do however make sure to reinstall your default video driver before restarting.
