Normally, one would install Virtual PC to run a beta operating system on top of their production environment. In this case however, you might just be risk taking enough to run a beta operating system as your production environment. In such a case, you may have applications or other things that don’t work the way you hoped under this operating system. This is where Virtual PC comes in – run a production operating system on top of a beta environment. Clever, huh?

First, you will need to have a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC. Install it like you normally would, Windows Vista will ask you for permission to install it, just click on Allow, and then it should install just fine.

Getting Service Pack 1 to install on the other hand is not such a breeze. On all of my test installations, when I tried to run Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 installation by running the MSI file, it failed, rolled back, and removed VPC completely. This was not what I had expected, and I suspect it is caused by Windows Vista’s User Account Protection.

The workaround is quite simple: Run the installation from the SETUP.EXE file included with the VPC2004SP1.zip package. It will ask you for permission to run the SETUP.EXE application, just press Allow. It should then install successfully.

Running it with UAP turned on also seems to cause issues. To avoid this, run Virtual PC as an Administrator (click Start, All Programs, right click on “Microsoft Virtual PC”, and then click “Run as administrator” – it will prompt you for permission, click on Allow.)

When running a Virtual PC, you may receive a message saying that Desktop Window Manager (DWM) has been disabled, and it will be re-enabled once you exit Virtual PC.