It’s been a crazy week here in the land of Arcane Code. Lots of traveling during a business trip, then the mad rush to take care of all the issues that arose while I was gone. I wanted to share a quick tip with you, now that you’ve had a chance to install and use Virtual PC.
If you run VPC on a laptop, as I do, you may have noticed some weird quirks especially when your laptop goes into Hibernate mode. Mostly the VPC becomes unresponsive, or in my case the main screen quits updating. Oddly enough the tiny icon window inside the VPC Console updates fine, but the big window doesn’t. Go figure.
Microsoft released a HotFix for this, but it didn’t get a lot of publicity. I found it buried in Virtual PC Guy’s weblog (http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/07/13/662538.aspx). Since it’s brief I’ll regurgitate it here, in case you are a cautious type about link clicking.
I think the reason the hot fix is hard to find is because you already have it. Go back to the directory where you exploded the Virtual PC 2004 file. In addition to the Setup.exe, the MSI and INFs you’ll also find a directory called “Laptop Hotfix”.
In this directory is a text file that looks mostly like a license. However, at the top of the file is a link to the knowledge base article (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=889677) that describes a few of the nasties that this patch repairs.
What’s really important though is the MSP file. Just double click on it to install, and it should patch your system. If you are running a laptop, or regularly use the Hibernate or Standby features of your computer then you need to apply this patch.
I haven’t seen mention of this if you are running Virtual Server 2005, so perhaps they already included the fix there. If someone knows otherwise feel free to leave a comment.
Arcane Code 
i want to download virtualpc.exe
nha – In the sidebar under top posts you’ll see my post on Virtualization. In that post I tell you where to get VPC from. Alternatively do a google search on VirtualPC 2007 on the microsoft site.