Ever feel your Windows computer getting junky with temporary files, trialware installations, and who knows what else that makes it act weird?
I used to hate that feeling, but now, I can just reboot and throw all that junk away, because my Windows computer is running on virtual hardware, created by a program called VMware.
VMware runs under Linux or Windows NT/2000/XP and creates a virtual hardware PC on which you can then install any PC OS: any Windows flavor, DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
The hardware emulation is very, very good, and lets you use almost all the resources of the host computer. I haven’t played with USB on it, but they say USB is supported, with the caveat that “some classes of USB devices are not supported, including devices that stream audio and video and those that serve as modems.”
I think it runs pretty close to full speed, and when it’s full-screen, you can’t tell that it’s a virtual PC. I use Windows 98 under VMware under Linux most of my computing day.
One of the features I like best is its undoable disks. You can tell the virtual hard drives to work like regular hard drives, and commit everything written to them, or, you can tell them to store any changes to the disk in this boot session to a temporary file. When you shut down, you have the choice of committing the changes to the permanent disk, or discarding them. You might think virtual hard drives would be slow, but I haven’t noticed any slowdown with them.
I have a base installation with Windows and just the programs I really need and trust installed, and then run Windows normally with the disks set to undoable. I save documents and such to a network drive (which happens to be a Samba share running under Linux on the same computer), but temporary work and files and installation of new software is done on the undoable disk. Then, at the end of the day or whenever Windows starts acting a little weird, I can shut down, discard the changes, and reboot with the fresh, clean base installation.
The virtual hard drives and state of the virtual PC are just files under Linux, so it’s possible to have a number of different virtual PCs in different states saved on the host computer, backed up on CD or DVD, etc.
VMware, starting at $299, is a bit pricey, but I really like the peace of mind and flexibility it gives me, and I think it’s a good value.
If you don’t need full hardware emulation and just want to host Windows 95/98/ME, you might also want to check out Win4Lin ($90).