Windows Vista has been out for quite a long time and a lot of issues have been found and a lot of fixes have come and more are on the way through SP1. A lot of people are making a move to the Vista platform from their Windows XP systems. However, there are many more who cannot move from Windows XP yet even if they could choose to. Most of such people need Windows XP due to work constraints.

This article describes the simple steps to install Windows Vista “within” your Windows XP environment using the freely available Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.

Initial Notes:

• Free up some hard disk space where you will keep the Virtual Hard Drive of you Virtual Machine (see below). I recommend at least 10 GB.
• This will work better if you have 1GB RAM to spare (which means you have about 2GB RAM). However, it is quite alright to even have 1 GB RAM, as the minimum requirement for Vista is only 512 MB.

Step 1: Get your setups ready.

• Download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.
• Get hold of a setup for Windows Vista. It can either be an ISO file or a CD/DVD.

Step 2: Install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and run the program.

• Run the setup for Virtual PC that you downloaded in Step 1 and finish installing the software.
• Run the Virtual PC program. When this program is run for the first time, it automatically launches the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”. Even if it doesn’t, this wizard can be accessed from the File menu.

Step 3: Create a New Virtual Machine using the Wizard

Click Next to Proceed.

Select the first option “Create a virtual machine” and click next.

Choose a name for your Virtual Machine and optionally a location where the virtual machine file will be saved and click next.

Choose which operating system you want to install; in our case, Windows Vista and click next.

If you have more than 1GB of RAM on your machine, then I suggest you choose the second option which lets you define how much RAM to allocate; click next.

On this screen, choose “A new virtual hard disk” option and click next. Basically we will be creating a Virtual Hard Drive for storing our virtual installation of Windows Vista.

On this screen, we define our Hard Disk size and Location. Set this location to wherever you freed up space in the initial steps. And also set the size that you want to allocate and click next.

Finish the process. Now you have a Virtual Machine setup and ready to boot.

Step 4: Run the Virtual Machine and Install Vista

From the Virtual PC Console, select the Vista Ultimate item and click Start. This launches the virtual machine. However, right now your virtual machine doesn’t have an operating system. So we need to install it. If you have a DVD for Windows Vista then your Virtual Machine should automatically boot from it and the Windows Vista installed will start. However, if you have Windows Vista ISO instead of a DVD you have to perform an extra step. On the menu of your Virtual Machine, there is a CD menu. Click on that and select the “Capture ISO Image