Avatech - Computers, Technology, Games, Movies, Airsoft Guns and More!: Virtual Machine

Do you want to run another operating system in your computer, but don't want to create a dual-boot or repartition your hard disk? If you do, then you will need a virtual machine program. Basically virtual machine is a program which runs in your current operating system which can emulate a complete computer system so that another operating systems can run at the same time (Just like you have a computer inside a computer).

Virtual machine has many advantages, some of them are:

It can run programs which are not supported by your primary operating system.
You can safely test a program or code in your virtual operating system.
Able to run more than one operating system at the same time without having another PC.
Less hassle and less risk to your hard disk partitions.

In my experience, there are two best virtual machine programs, first is the most complete virtual machine system called VMWare Workstation. It features a complete virtual machine toolset and supports for almost all operating systems. However, it is quite hungry for resources, slow, and the most important is that you have to pay for it.
The second one is very good for basic use, not very resource intensive but only support Windows OS and some Linux OS. It's called Virtual PC. The best thing is that Virtual PC is free for Windows users.

Note that virtual machine softwares are best run in a computer equipped with dual-core or multi CPUs. An Intel CPU with Virtualization Technology also proven to give better performance when running these softwares.

Here are some screenshots of both softwares: