I usually spend my weekends writing a few drafts for articles that I'm going to post for CMS Report. The idea is that I'm not competing with the hectic pace I usually find myself in during the weekdays. Well, I found myself distracted from the usual writing endeavor for two reasons: 1) Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 and 2) the snow finally melting leaving a nice warm weekend to be outside. Needless to say, not much time was spent with the computer. However, let's talk about Microsoft and something they finally did right.
A focus lately has been on the fact that you can run Windows inside of an Apple Mac through virtualization. What the commercials don't talk about is that you can also run the same type of software, such as Parallels, to also run the Linux OS inside your Mac. Since Microsoft Windows and Linux are the primary operating systems I use at work, the ability to run the two operating systems together is of interest to me. In fact that interest is so great that for the first time in a decade I've been considering to buy a Mac at home.
During the past five years I've been dual-booting between Windows and Linux on my PCs both at home and work. However, there are inconveniences with dual-booting due to the the constant need to reboot your machine to get to the other operating system. This better method is virtualization and something Apple has been promoting the past year or so to lure in Windows users to their computers. Now Microsoft's free Virtual PC has arrived and I think it is about to change my world.