Virtualising

[Paul Herber]

I need to run several versions of Visio on the same PC, all Windows XP Pro. Can anyone tell me what the various options are? Thanks.

[Jumpy]

I can tell you about one option. When I had problems with the German Version of Visio (see the Problems with RGB-function post) I installed a English "Free Trial Version" on a virtual machine. I have the VMWare Server installed on my PC (which sadly run's with Vista). I had a virtual clone of my old PC which has XP installed which I started in the VMWare Server and in which I installed the other Visio Version. Worked fine.

I can't tell you, what the performance will be, if you run several virtual machines at once, so that you can test several Visio Version at once.
Also there is a problem with the legality of this, because you would need a licence for every virual Win XP you where running.

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Microsoft has his own virtualisation concepts, which i havn't used jet, but for them you can find legal virtual machines with Win XP which only run for a short time, but that may be enough for your tests.

[Visio Guy]

I usually build virtual pcs to handle this, and since I have an MSDN subscription, I don't run into license problems (as far as I know, hah!)

I used to have Visio 2003 and Visio 2007 on the same machine. Every time I switched from one to the other, you had to wait for MS to screw with your registry. It's about ten seconds or so, which gets old, but I didn't switch *that* often, so it was tolerable.

As far as various language on the same machine goes, I don't have any experience.