I was interested to see what Windows 7 was like, so downloaded a copy of the beta, but didn’t have a spare PC to install it on.

However, I have a MediaCentre PC under my telly that is running Vista Home Premium and wondered if I could install Windows 7 using the built-in Virtual PC application.

So I fired the application up and created a new Virtual PC of type Other with 1024Mb of memory, catpured the ISO image of Windows 7 Beta that I had saved to my Desktop and started the installation.

And it worked perfectly. I now have Windows 7 working happily in a Virtual PC window on my Vista machine. And I must say Windows 7 looks pretty funky, and it seems to be fairly quick even running in this configuration.