Microsoft Virtual PC

This is just my brain free-wheeling on a Friday afternoon...

Assuming you had a system with sufficient resources, would there be any benefit to running a DAW within the Virtual PC environment?

At present, I only own XP Home, which isn't supported -- but I'm going to keep reading, this could be reason enough to upgrade to XP Pro.

Carry on.

Russ

The Feb 2008 PC Magazine has an article about VirtualPC and VMWare's products. They claim VirtualPC it installs and runs fine on WinXP Home although it does complain about being on an unsupported host. On the other hand, how much support do you get from MS on free applications?

The OP assumed the system would have sufficient resources. I suspect the concern would be the real-time demands put on the system rather than the raw horsepower demands. I think that's what Frank was referring to.

One nice use of a virtual environment is to try out something without worrying about it impacting the system outside of the virtual environment. If you don't like the new version of the DAW, or a totally different one, toss out that virtual environment and it's gone. You could have a virtual environment excluding the things you don't need. You might leave out email clients that look for mail from time to time, or products that look for updates at the most inopportune times. You might leave out the internet connection (I guess some folks do that to avoid viruses and other nasty things). You might leave out the virus scanning products. Lean and mean......

Not all the virtual environments support all the interfaces you might need. For example, some don't support USB (but that's probably changing).

As long as your system has the resources, it's not supposed to be hard, or expensive, to try out a virtual PC. Could be fun! Unfortunately my WinXP Home system only has 512MB of memory which isn't enough.

--Larry