Microsoft Virtual PC

I happened to spend most of this week in an IBM class using VMWare for the training environment (Windows XP Pro hosted on a Windows 2000 machine). This got me wondering about the free systems offered by many providers.

Here’s a few quick thoughts on Microsoft‘s offering, which admittedly seems pretty good.

Their product overview shows that you can run most (all?) previous Microsoft Operating System’s (MS-DOS, Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista… etc. ), even IBM’s OS/2 all on a single host machine with enough resources. Minimum usage per VM appears to be about 64MB RAM and 500MB disk space for the older OS’s, newer versions obviously requiring significantly more resources.

Since I’ve got most of these old OS installation disks in storage, I’ll give this a try and see how well it works. This may make for some interesting testing lab scenarios.

References:

Personalized Internet Radio

While many terrestrial radio stations “stream” their content to make it available to anyone with an Internet connection, sometimes it’s still “just radio”.

For a true ‘net’ user, it’s often better to make the whole thing personalized and interactive, not to mention…. commercial free!

There are several popular services available for this, here are a few that I’m familiar with:

All of the above are free (for now), though the RIAA is trying to change yet another “good thing” and may make this impossible for these companies to support in the future.

Happy listening!

Free Instant Messaging (IM) Clients

As indicated way back in my ‘Contact Information’ entry, I use several IM client networks. To make it easier on myself (and my poor computers), it’s usually easier to get an integrated client that connect to many services within one program.

My favorites:

For an even easier way to connect without software installations and to bypass many corporate proxy’s and/or firewalls is to use a web client.

My favorite (as I’m not aware of any others that are still online):

TTYL!

Unreal Tournament 2004

I’m not much of a game player, but a group of guys from the office decided that it would be fun to blow off some steam by fragging each other once in a while. I’ve got a dedicated server setup, but for obvious reasons it’s password protected. If you are a regular reader of this blog and are interesting in joining us on occasion, please drop me an email or reply to this post. Even better… see me IRL.

Happy fragging!