Monday, December 18, 2006

Virtual Machine Software, for Free!

We all like free software. I especially do being that I am still studing for my MCSE and can't afford high end software. My company likes free software because it allows our small IT budget to go further.

Microsoft has released Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for no cost. This is excellenct news since that is the software I use at school to train with. You can find out more about Microsoft's Virtual PC software here. One of the links is for Virtual PC 2007 Beta. I am currently installing this to see what the next generation of Virtual Machine software has to offer.

Virtual Machine software has a place in a lot of IT Departments tool set. It allows me as a Developer to have identical machines on which to test my software on. I can easily roll back a machine to it's previous state. For what I do in my job I can test out new software or a new patch before rolling it out to my clients.

I hope that my next computer has Virtualization technology built into the processor (as most do these days) to make my virtual experiance faster!

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