Windows 7: VMWare player vs Windows Virtual PC

Hi,

for a physical machine like this:
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Intel Core i7-740QM 1.73 GHz / 1333 MHz, 6 MB L2
4Gig RAM
512MB Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M
Win 7 Pro 64-bit
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what is the better choice - VMWare Player, or Windows 7 virtual PC?

Guest OS's will be mainly XP sp3 pro 32-bit.
Better choice means mainly better guest performance. And, less impact on the host OS, when a VM is not running / VM is started but minimized.
I found lots of comparisons, but outdated.

I would give the nod to VMware Player. The only real advantage Windows Virtual PC with Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate is that XP Mode includes a license for XP. But if you have your own licenses for XP or plan to convert XP Mode to VMware, then VMware would be the better solution. It's better performance-wise and allows more hardware options to be configured such as multiple CPUs or cores, more RAM, 3D Acceleration among other things.

I agree with Darician. I tried both & VMware Player is superior in all aspects.

VMware player is what I use. It has support for more guest OS's. They are the pioneers in the virtualization space and have been doing it a lot longer than the other players.

I tried all 3 major Virtualization apps (Virtualbox, Windows Virtual PC and VMware) I chose VMware due to better USB integration between host and guest OS and because I own 3 older XP games that all work in VMware only.

Hi there

Also please don't forget the following
1) Vmware (and vbox) have support of NON MS Guest Os'es such as pretty well any Linux distribution you want to try out.

2) Vmware will allow you to run a 64 Bit Guest OS on a 32 bit HOST if you want to -- provided the virtualisation feature is enabled in your Bios. For modern machines excluding most netbooks this will be enabled anyway so you can run a Windows 7 X-64 bit VM on a Windows XP host if you want --but if you do this host and guest together can only see a max of 4GB ram.

Cheers

jimbo