I thought I'd be smart this time. I installed Virtual PC 2004 on my Windows XP Pro desktop. Inside Virtual PC, I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1.

Well, the good news is, everything works.

The bad news is, it runs as slow as a 95-year-old in a buffet line. What should take under a minute drags on for 10 minutes. Visual Studio takes 10 minutes or so to start, and a 95-year-old takes 10 minutes or so to take a spoonful of potatoes and put it on their plate.

(With apologies to 95-year-olds.)

Part of this is not a surprise. I recently saw some benchmarks comparing Virtual PC to VMWare, and VMWare was an order of magnitude faster at most tasks. Overall, the article gives VMWare a rating of “166.5”, and Virtual PC a rating of “131.4”. VMWare is 26% faster overall, but this masks some tasks (2D graphic) where VMWare is 400% or more faster.

So to summarize, I have not been able to play with Visual Studio 2005 as much as I would like, primarily due to the enormous amount of time required to do anything with it.

I guess I am going to have to either find a dedicated machine for this, or try to install it alongside my existing version of Visual Studio. My fear is that this “beta” software will be hard to remove, or will do something horrendous that requires a complete machine repave. And I don't want to do that...

Hmmm.