Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

Your legacy applications won’t work under Windows Vista? Run it under an older operating system you’ve loaded into Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (VPC 07). The utility may not be quite as full-featured as VMware Workstation, but it has one big advantage, because it’s free!

VPC 07 runs under Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate, plus XP Professional and Tablet Edition, but not Vista Home or XP Home. You can install nearly any PC-compatible OS inside its virtual machines, though. I got DOS 6.22, Red Hat Linux, Windows 95, Windows 98, and two instances of XP working. The virtual machines can all read the system’s CD and DVD drives and can take turns using the floppy disk drive. But for USB support, you need a competitor: VMware or Parallels Workstation.

VPC can save and restore a VM’s state but has nothing like VMware’s multiple snapshots. It does have an equivalent to VMware’s “linked clone” feature, and wizards ease the creation of VMs and disks. All told, I found VPC 07 intuitive and stocked with everything casual users need to manage programs that don’t like Vista.