Windows Vista: December 2006 Archives

One of the features touted in both Windows XP and Windows Vista is a set of power-conservation features that encompass both desktop and notebook PCs.  Saving power on a notebook PC is an obvious benefit, but reducing desktop power consumption has now become a much bigger deal than it might have seemed even five years ago.  With Intel and AMD rolling out CPUs that boast of less wattage, it makes sense for Microsoft to provide additional fine-grained control over power consumption on their end.

To a high degree, that's what they've done with Windows Vista, and XP users are going to want to know how to dig into all that and make use of it.

Virtually Better

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The last several days have been terribly busy, but I did want to drop a note about Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.  It's still in beta, but the beta appears to be quite open; I was able to sign up and download the code without any trouble.  The reason I was curious about it, aside from being interested in virtualization issues in general, is because it apparently runs Windows Vista a whole lot better out of the box than the older edition did -- and runs on Vista.

As a result, if you want to run Vista now but still have some variety of full-machine backwards-compatibility, you could install Vista as your main OS and have XP running in a virtual session.

(Note that if you have an existing copy of Virtual PC you'll need to unload it before installing 2007; they can't be run side-by-side.)

I'll let you know how things go with it.