Resizing Virtual PC 2004 Disks
I've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to create a few Virtual PC 2004 images for my development team. All I want to do is get a copy of XP Pro running with Whidbey installed and ready for development. It's taken me way too long to just get XP and Whidbey installed, only to find that I underestimated the required disk space, so now I can't install the Whidbey docs. If anyone knows how to resize an existing disk without corrupting it, please shout out!
I think VPC is a very handy product and have used it for demos in a few presentations and non-production development.
Now a few gripes:
1. By default VPC installs to 'Give processes on the host operating system priority'. This is bad, for those of us who can be forgetful of small, but important, details. I installed VPC on this desktop and forgot to change that setting before I started installing XP Pro on a new VPC image. After four hours it was still telling me I had 37 minutes left, and it didn't appear to feel motivated to get past that.
At that point, I remembered this performance setting. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to take effect until the VPC restarts, so I had to start over installing XP.
VPC folks: Please change the default to 'Run Virtual PC at maximum speed'.
2. Even running at maximum speed (and allocating 512MB RAM to it), it still runs a bit slow. I suppose you can only ask so much, but it would be nice to tweak it up a bit, especially on the installs. Whidbey took a lot longer to install than it does on one of my slower PCs (outside of VPC).
3. Is there any way to install the VPC Additions automagically, before the OS installs? It takes a bit to get to the point where you can install the Additions. And forget about Longhorn.... If nothing else, perhaps prompting the user to remember to install them would be handy. I've seen a good few folks worrying about issues that are solved by the Additions.
4. The help leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe I'm spoiled by MSDN, but it is hard to navigate and doesn't really have much there. This area really needs improvement. Maybe including a FAQ and/or performance tweaking section (if there's anything I'm not aware of in this area) would be helpful.
Other than general slowness, the idea of the product is great, and the implementation isn't bad (just could be better). Maybe it just needs time to mature, since MS just bought it last year.