Virtual PC rocks!
I have started to use Microsoft Virtual PC to test applications and such with older operating systems. In fact it's also been nostalgic to get out old OSs, I've already setup Win98, 95, Dos 6.22 and soon I'm going to do WinME (never used it before) and Win 3.11.
I've even been creating alternate flavors of each OS, when it comes to Windows I'll create a n "out of the box" installation so that I have a truly clean OS to fiddle with. I then copy the install and create an "all updates" flavor that, as stated, contains all updates to all the major parts of Windows (Media Player, IE, patches, etc).
For 98 I created a third flavor, which is "all updates + uSP2". uSP2 is all the updates for 98 that are not publicly released as well as updates given out to WinME/2000/XP but lack a 98 installer. In other words uSP2 makes Win98 the OS is was truly meant to be.
I've also run into the problem of Virtual PC's hard drive images bloating way out of control. While it's great that VPC will re-size the image as needed, the problem is, it will only increase the image size, it won't shrink it as needed.
A great example is my Win95 installation, which I copied to the C drive before installing, was using like 720megs after the copy, but when I completed installation and deleted the installation folder, the image still used 720megs even though the actually HD usage was around 120megs.
In my next post I'll explain how to shrink .vhd files using features included with VPC. It seems most people do not know these features exist aside from a couple Microsoft articles I dug up.