Today, I decided to make good use of my time by messing about in a Windows 95 virtual PC. I duly started up Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 - my PC virtualization environment of choice, started up my virtual Windows 95 box, and Windows got as far as successfully loading DOS, and was just about to go into Windows until I recieved the message "General Protection Fault". Considering my personal files reside in a seperate partition to Vista and all my programs, they had not been hurt when I had upgraded my PC. Virtual PC only emulates the CMOS, the hard disk and the memory. It natively uses the host's processor, and as the last time I had used that particular Virtual PC, I had been using my AMD Athlon64 processor I had a sneaking suspicion I may net to reinstall Windows 95 so that it would work with my Intel Core 2 processor. I duly started re-formatting the virtual hard disk drive and setting about installing Windows 95. The first phase os Setup completed without any problems. It was only when I restarted the computer to complete the second phase of Setup it happenned again - another General PRotection fault. It would seem that Windows 95 doesn't seem to like my shiny new processor.
It was lucky that I have been Beta testing VMWare Workstation 6.0. I had downloaded the Release Candidate over the last weekend of the Easter Vacation, and it has been waiting on my Flash disk for me to install it, so I did. I then set about making a virtual Windows 95 box, and was given the option to only emulate one processor. I gave it a 1GB hard disk and 64MB of RAM, and started installing it. Once Windows was installed I installed VMWare tools, which makes up the driver set needed to run Windows 95 in VMWare Workstation. Once that was set up, I gave setting Internet Explorer 3 up to access the Internet through the Hull University Proxy server, and it worked.
I don't know whether they will follow this through to the RTM release of VMWare Workstation 6.0 but I like the fact that the product still supports Windows 95, even with full networked Internet access. It's funny but I could not get NAT working in VMWare Workstation 5.5 for Windows 95. It's also interesting to note that VMWare Tools is still fully compatible with Windows 95, whereas the Virtual PC 2007 version of Virtual Machine Additions is no longer Windows 95 compatible. Keep up the good work VMWare.
I can see why you still have to pay for VMWare Workstation while Virtual PC has become freeware. VMware is more advanced and features support for multiple monitors, better dual-core support, USB 2.0 support, multiple optical drives, and the ability to omit drives from a virtual machine's configuration, and most importantly, full support for the most popular Linux distributions. You can run 32- and 64-bit operating systems as guest regardless of your host OS.
No comments:
Post a Comment