Virtual PC, RIP

It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that on the day Apple moved the last of their hardware to chipsets that can run Windows natively, Microsoft announced that Virtual PC was to be axed. ‘Tis a shame, as this was very cool code, allowing a virtual PC running XP (or other things, I’m told) to run on top of the OS X desktop. My primary use of this technology was for support of things going bump in the middle of the night from my day job, but lots of other folks were doing more clever things with it, I’m sure.

The downside is that I only bought my license for it about eight months ago, and it wasn’t exactly cheap. 🙁

The common rub on VPC was the horsepower it took to run it. With single processor or single core machines, it was known to really chew up the machine. With my Quad though, it was no big deal, aside from causing every fan in the machine to start spinning uncontrollably.

I can sure understand Microsoft’s position though. Why keep building and supporting code that is on the path to extinction. With the new Apple hardware, folks can dual-boot to a real XP environment, and there are a boatload of technologies coming that may allow virtual XP sessions on Intel-based Apple OS X desktops.

So, while this doesn’t affect me greatly — my VPC code will still run — it’s sad to see it go away. Now, I wonder if I can use that XP license for something else…… 😉