I finally got around to upgrading my Windows 7 RC to RTM version and decided to dive into Virtual PC. So far so good:

  1. Unlike per usual where I'd backup, reformat, boot from DVD drive and do a clean install of the OS, I opted for the standard setup.exe experience. It got rid of everything but kept directories into windows.old. From what I can tell, everything worked as expected post-install experience. (I backed up everything just in case....I'm not quite that bold yet to trust the default behaviors)
  2. Installed antivirus software and followed this up by setting up Windows Virtual PC. I hadn't tried this during the RC but wanted to try out XP mode per Virtual PC Guy's Quake 2 entries.
  3. I also setup a Windows Vista virtual machine for betaware. In particular, I wanted to get VS2010 Beta 2 in there so that I could try it both within VPC and as a virtual application. Once I installed the VPC integration components, the virtual instances ran smoothly.

Overall, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with the overall Virtual PC experience after years of abuse. I had setup VMs with dev environments in the past (WinXP with VPC 2004, Vista with VPC 2007) but it was too much to bear. I'm hoping third time is the charm for VM dev environments. If not, I could always take the less virtual more machine approach, even if there are caveats.