There is Microsoft Virtual PC, which you get with a free licensed Windows XP Professional hard drive image if you are running Windows 7 Professional or higher. It also automatically difference images the original, so it remains untouched in the Program Files directory it is installed to.
Of course, that virtual machine is geared more toward business software and such, and only emulates a really weak S3 SVGA chipset, and defaults to displaying through a Terminal Services / Remote Desktop interface instead of the actual SVGA emulation.
If you want fully accelerated video, including WDDM drivers for Windows Vista and newer, you'll want either VMWare Player or Virtualbox. Both solutions are free for non-commercial use, as far as I know. VMWare is probably the most efficient for Windows guests, while Virtualbox is preferred for Linux guests.
vmware player is nice, but vmware server was absolutely worthless when I used it. Many things would be very buggy, and it performed poorly overall. It even gave me an ERROR 200 OK in the process of using it. What crap.
Maybe these people were born without that part of their brain that lets you try different things to see if they work better. --Retsupurae
paulguy wrote:but vmware server was absolutely worthless when I used it. Many things would be very buggy, and it performed poorly overall. It even gave me an ERROR 200 OK in the process of using it. What crap.
Agreed. As I said in the OP, it's okay in Linux if you get it to play nice but GL on windows, especially 7 (and maybe any 64-bit windows version?).
Thanks Kode and diminish, forgot how bad MS virtual PC got. will be giving VMware player a shot, assuming I can make my own virtual HDD images and such.
<Nach> so why don't the two of you get your own room and leave us alone with this stupidity of yours? NSRT here.
I thought VMWare Player didn't support the ability to create virtual machines, it only supported running existing virtual machines. Last time I tried it a fair few months ago it crashes whenever trying to run a Virtual PC virtual machine via it (A supposedly supported process).
Core i7 920 @ 2.66GHZ | ASUS P6T Motherboard | 8GB DDR3 1600 RAM | Gigabyte Geforce 760 4GB | Windows 10 Pro x64