im trying to learn more about virtual pc's and decide if i want to set one up. can someone help me out... what are the specifications when installing a virtual pc like vmware? can i just add it to my current computer so i can connect to it from school? is there a virtual pc that will just let me spawn a linux os? i dotn know much about this so any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks

One thing to keep in mind when use Virtual PC products is that the running VM will eat up as much physical ram as you give it. For example if you have 512 mem in your pc and you give a VM 256 that only leaves 256 for you physical machine OS to run on.

As far as access from school think of VM's a just a "white box computer" So if you can configure your real PC to bee seen from school then yes it can be seen as well.

Yes you can run linux in a VM. Here's a link to all supported OS's http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/d...s.html#1032196

Also vmware has a nice community support board http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID=19

Hope this helps out

is there a way to enable the VM when i leave, and disable it when im using my computer?

and this doesnt really make sence to me

huh?

You could try Microsoft Virtual PC

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

That is a link to a free 45 day trial, if you like it you can buy it. As far as I know it is less expensive than VMWare and just as functional, although it may be full of bugs considering it is a Microsoft Program. I have used it and it works quite well with most Linux Distros, except SUSE would not work at all with it. Pretty much Install the program, click on the link to make a new VM, give it as much RAM as you want it to have, and then double click on it to start it and stick a Linux CD in your CD-ROM drive or tell it to mount an iso file, and it will install Linux inside of Windows.