Mr. A is in a strange situation. He used to love Windows XP, but switched to Windows Vista thinking that it will be better. He loved the looks but Windows Vista was too buggy to love. But the looks were appealing too. So how could he use Windows XP being inside Vista? Well, if you are perplexed like Mr. A then I have the answer for you. Just take a look.

  • Download and install Virtual PC.
  • Launch it, click Next to start the wizard, and click Next again to create a virtual machine.

The wizard then asks you to confirm the amount of memory and disk space to dedicate to the virtual machine. If you have 2GB or more on your host PC, give 512MB to the virtual XP machine. Unless you plan to install lots of apps, the default hard disk size is usually fine.

  • Click Next and then finish, and your virtual machine will appear in the virtual PC Console.
  • Insert an XP Installation CD, and then double click the virtual-machine icon in the Virtual PC Console to start it up.
  • Select the optical drive in the Virtual C’s CD menu, choose Action, and then click Ctrl-Alt-Del to boot the virtual machine from the CD.

After that, the installation process should proceed just as it would on a non-virtual PC.

To Run your virtual XP machine

  • Select it in the Virtual PC Console and click Start.
  • To close it down, click Close, choose Save state from the list of options, and click OK.
  • Clicking within the virtualized OS Window once allows it to capture the mouse pointer.

Importable Features

In the Virtual PC menu, click Action * Install or Update Virtual Machine Additions to install several tools that will allow you to copy and paste text between the virtual machine and the host PC. You will also be able to send documents back and forth via a shared folder on the host system.
To get the mouse pointer to release back to the host OS, press the right-hand key and drag the mouse out of the Virtual PC window.