I’ve continued to play with Windows 7, and now have build 7100 (64 bit) installed on a work PC too. Unfortunately, one of the apps I have to work with is Internet Explorer 6, and obviously Windows 7 does not have a native option for IE6 – you can run IE7 or upgrade to IE8, but IE 6 has been relegated to the trash pile in every setting except, sadly, the corporation. I do have a dedicated test PC with IE6 on it, but had heard about Windows 7 built-in XP Virtualization mode, and decided to give it a shot. I downloaded the update and XP image, installed it all (one reboot required), and was soon up-and-running with a Virtual Machine.

However, I really wanted to run IE6 from my Windows 7 Start Menu, and was pretty pleased with the Windows 7 VPC’s option for this: you can either choose to run the complete VPC or individual apps (but not both). You can have multiple virtual apps running side-by-side, but not an app running alongside a complete VPC – which kind of makes sense. The applications that are exposed in the Windows 7 menu (and which can be dragged to the Start menu if desired) are all stored in the VPC’s “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs” folder. Any applications added to the VPC’s Start Menu are automatically added to the Windows 7 Host’s menu too – pretty nice.

Memory management was quite good, too. After it was instantiated (which did take quite some time…) it was only using 15MB of RAM. VPC seems to persist in memory, even if you shut down a virtual app, and so restarting it later is almost instantaneous. However, the VPC does need to be reinitialized after every reboot.

Overall, it was pretty painless, and works well. I now have IE6 running side-by-side with my other browsers on Windows 7.