Running Virtual PC 2007 on Windows 7

Attention: In this blog post I am discussing a configuration that is possible, but not officially supported by Microsoft at this point in time. Feel free to use this – but understand that you are in an unsupported configuration.

There is a fair amount of confusion out there about this – so I would like to start by simply stating that “Yes, it is possible to run Virtual PC 2007 on Windows 7”:

vpc20072

You might be wondering why you would want to do this.  The most common reason is that you want to run Virtual PC on Windows 7 on a system that does not have hardware virtualization support.

There are, however, two issues that you should be aware of if you want to do this:

  1. To reiterate, this is not officially supported.  Microsoft has not tested / qualified to combination, and has not made any commitment to ever do so.  So “buyer be warned”.

  2. A number of people have reported that when they try to install Virtual PC 2007 they receive a compatibility warning like this:

    vpc20073

    What you need to know is that you will only receive this warning if you have installed Windows Virtual PC.  If you get this, and you want to use Virtual PC 2007 instead of Windows Virtual PC, you will need to uninstall Windows Virtual PC.  Note – it will not work if you just uncheck Windows Virtual PC under the Windows Features dialog.  You need to actually uninstall the Windows Virtual PC update:

    VPC2007

    Once you have done this you can install Virtual PC 2007.

You can download Virtual PC 2007 SP1 from here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5

Cheers,
Ben