I’ve got the PDC build running on my box. Jim Allchin was right; it isn’t exactly screamingly fast – at least in Virtual PC. Here are a few notes:

·         Needless to say, but: Have a dedicated box for Longhorn or use Virtual PC. I’ll likely get a new box when I am back at home. Sounds like a machine brutally optimized for 3D gaming is a good bet – along with 2GB of memory.

·         If you can’t at least assign 256MB of memory to the VPC machine, forget it. If you can allocate more, go for it. Shut down all apps and services on the host you can and give Longhorn room to breathe.

·         The VPC2004 from the PDC disks will remove any previous Virtual PC builds from Connectix. The version from the PDC disks will expire February 28^th, 2004. Which means that I just went from a licensed copy to a demo copy. I don’t like that, at all.

·         You will need to log on to the windowsbeta.microsoft.com server to acquire your product key. The userid and password is in the disk booklet.

·         Take your time. Installing into Virtual PC takes a very long time. Expect that your box will take about 2-3 hours and I wouldn’t do too much on it during that time. Expect the box to lock up, requiring a hard reset. It did that several times for me.

·         I’ve mounted one of the ISO images from Disk 2 into VPC, which seemed to be the most convenient option.

·         On my Dell Inspiron 8100, Longhorn comes up in 4-bit color mode and that’s the only mode available. You will have to install the VPC additions into Longhorn to get a graphics driver that works, reboot and then switch to that one.

·         Just right after install, with nothing done, the VPC disk size stands at 3GB. I think you should have some 6-10GB available if you want to do anything with it but looking.