Ok, sorry for the lack of a true Mac item, but people interested in virtualization might find this interesting anyway. I installed the newly free-ed Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 on an unsupport Windows version (at least it is not listed as supported in the Microsoft downloads area): Windows Media Center Edition. I decided to try to install Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition (also free) on Windows 2000. So, I found a copy of Windows 2000 Professional Edition and the Service Pack 4 disc for it and installed it under Virtual PC 2004.

The installation went fine, but the various security updates required three passes and three reboots. Lots of downloading and waiting. I also had to find an Internet Explorer 6 disc and then upgrade it to SP1 as required by Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. At this point, I shut down the Guest OS and made a copy of the virtual hard disk to an external hard drive. After the various reboots and, I think, just shy of 500MB of downloads (I opted to install the documentation and SQL Server Express too), I appear to have a working instance of Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition in my little sandboxed Windows 2000.

The process should be more or less the same using Parallels Desktop for Mac on an Intel-based Mac (see my review of it at Parallels Desktop for the Mac). So, go forth and virtualize, folks :-)