Random Musings

Tag: Vista

Running Windows 7 Beta under Vista’s Virtual PC

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.

Getting a MediaCenter PC to go to sleep

I’ve got a nice little MediaPC that I bought from these guys which is running MediaCenter under Vista Home Premium and is turned on 24×7

In these days of Climate Change economic doom and gloom it thought I would look into getting it to standby when not in use, but come back to life when I needed to use it, or it needed to record something off the telly for me.

Setting the power settings in Vista didn’t work so I googled for some answers and found this little application, the MCE Standby Tool which promises to “make all the required power management settings, even some which are normally inaccessible” and make my machine sleep soundly.

It’s a small nifty looking app and seems well written:

 

It didn’t seem to work at first but with a bit of tinkering I discovered that the LogMeIn client was causing the machine to come out of standby as soon as it activated.

And then I remembered that the PC runs SqueezeCentre that my Squeezebox Boom connects to. So the next thing to test is getting Wake on LAN to work…

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