Many years ago I had finally (after months of fiddling and newsgroup messages) got networking to work in the then current (and very early) version of Virtual PC when I got an offer to use VM Workstation for nothing.

I had a look at it and when I discovered that networking just worked by saying you wanted networking (what an interesting concept!), I switched to VM Workstation and have been there ever since updating (still for nothing) my version to the latest version all the time.

Well now the good times are over. I no longer seem to have free updates to VM Workstation 6.0 from 5.5 and so it's decision time.

Do I fork out $99 for the upgrade to VM Workstation 6.0 so that it officially supports Vista; do I stay at the final version of VM workstation 5.5 which it tells me doesn't support running under Vista ("Windows 6" it calls it) but actually works perfectly well when the Host is Vista; or do I move to Virtual PC 6.0 or to the latest version of Virtual Server ?

At the moment I'm sticking with VM Workstation 5.5. When Virtual PC 6.0 was the only thing that was supposed to work under Vista, I tried that and I found that I could specify a VM but then couldn't actually get that VM to install the operating system. Obviously there must be a way but it just wouldn't pick up the OS installation CD (MSDN) on the CD drive on my portable. Anyway, I don't fancy messing with its networking again !

The major problem with staying with VM Workstation 5.5 is that I seem to have created an awful lot of VMs under VM Workstation Beta 6.0 and none of them will load under 5.5. Of course at the time I was expecting to get a free upgrade to VM Workstation 6.0 just as I'd got a free upgrade from that first free copy of 4.5 to 5.0.

On the other hand it's probably good for me to have to start creating new VMs from scratch as I seem to have totally lost control of what is installed in what VM (and which VMs need other VMs in order to work and which don't).

This time around I'll try to do better - maybe one improvement will be if I try to avoid having Intel and AMD copies of the same VM. Now that I'm only working 3 day weeks (in summer) and 4 day weeks (in winter) I can do all of my VM work on my home (AMD 64-bit) portable - now that I've upped it's memory from 1.5GB to 2GB it's fast enough. The IBM (Intel) portable was memory-bound and too slow anyway.

I've started my VM clean-up by creating a single new VM in an external drive that didn't previously have any VMs. I've called it a sensible name (including the info that it's a 5.5 VM) and once I'd got a mass of security updates in it, I saved a couple of extra copies of it.

Maybe this time I'll keep control of my VMs (but don't hold your breath).