Virtual-Pc on Anything About IT

Restricting the use of Windows Virtual PC

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 18:38:34 +0000

Windows Virtual PC is a great feature of Windows 7, but unfortunately Microsoft did not consider to provide any Group Policy settings to control the use of it. In an enterprise or small business environment you might want to do the following:

Completely restrict the use of Windows Virtual PC (even if users have local administrative rights and can enable the feature)
Prevent the creation of additional Virtual machines other than the one you prepared for them such as an XPMode VM

ToolTip: XP-More

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:19:51 +0000

XP-More is a tool that helps manage Windows 7 Virtual Machines (XP Mode and any other). Specifically, it makes duplication of VMs a no brainer - no more raw XML editing and manually duplicating files.

More Information and download details can be found on the CodePlex XP-More project page

Accessing the BIOS in Windows Virtual PC

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:05:37 +0000

When setting up a Virtual Machine in Windows Virtual PC, You will see the following progress window when the VM is started. This indicates that the VM is running in Enhanced Mode which is the default. To better understand the different modes of Windows Virtual PC I recommend reading the “Three Modes of Windows XP Mode” article.

The progress windows is being displayed until the OS running in the VM has started up, so you have no chance to interrupt the boot process to access the BIOS. To get access to the VM BIOS, you must run the VM in Basic Mode. Running a VM in Basic Mode means that you must disable the integration features.