The official description: Windows® Virtual PC is a new optional component for the Windows 7 operating system that you can use to evaluate and migrate to Windows 7 while maintaining compatibility with applications that run on older versions of Windows.

My version of description: Windows® Virtual PC is the latest take aimed at those who still insist on while claiming enjoying using Windows NT4, NT5, and NT5.1, namely Windows XP, especially those in enterprise.

Although the fact is XP’s heyday is long over, yet Windows XP is still a very good OS to use in virtualization, thanks for its being very slim and quite productive.

The fashion in IT industry for now is virtualization, mainly for servers but with Intel’s great PARROT-powered Conroe-based variants increasingly serving every corner of the world and AMD’s trying to keep up, today’s desktops and even laptops got great capacity in power to run virtualizations that obsolete servers feared most.

Many big vendors specialize in virtualization, and two common solutions are Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMware’s VM Workstation and VM Server. Windows Virtual PC is actually a special toasted Virtual PC.

If you run Windows XP and want to maintain compatibility with applications that run on that operating system, Windows Virtual PC provides an easy way for you to do this. You can use Windows XP mode to access a virtualized instance of Windows XP that is ready for you to customize with your own applications. You can even use Windows XP mode and Windows 7 to run applications seamlessly in Windows 7 when the applications are actually installed in Windows XP. Windows XP mode is available for the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise, and Windows 7 Ultimate.

You also can use Windows Virtual PC to run other versions of 32-bit Windows operating systems, while also running Windows 7.

Before you begin, you should know that, still in development, Windows Virtual PC Beta requires Windows 7 RC and  hardware-assisted virtualization. The virtualization support is available in processors that include a virtualization option—specifically processors with Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology. More about hardware virtualization could be found here.

If you need information on which Intel CPU supports VT technology, go here for a check. [I didn’t find any similar page on AMD’s website.]

Hope that your CPU supports hardware virtualization so as to continue installing Windows Virtual PC.

Please read on to discover more about Windows Virtual PC.