I’m posting this from a copy of Windows XP that lives inside my Powerbook, as illustrated below. It’s been many years since I tried to use Virtual PC. Happily, except for fighting my way though an obtuse thicket of networking config dialogs to diagnose and correct an odd default networking setting that prevented this OS from seeing the intarweb via that OS, et al, everything’s working swimmingly.

Now, for the endless round of Windows system updates, and (naturally) Firefox. Avaunt!

I suppose, for the sake of posterity, I should go into a bit more detail about fixing the networking. VPC treats the host machine as a DHCP server, and assigns an arbitrary, fixed number to the the host on the subnet it sets up (this is an informed guess, so ymmv). That IP is the same for the gateway value and for the DNS value. Well, the DNS was not doing its’ job; reliable servers were unpingable.

I set the computer to use the same DNS that my home LAN does, and that appears to have resolved the issue.

One troubling point that undermines my ‘bad DNS’ thesis is that I was able to ping the good DNS under the default networking setup, but only once. Immediately after, on implementing the new DNS, I was unable to ping the same IP. Perhaps I was falling victim to the notoriously slow setup processes within VPC, and the connection had not yet been established. Whatever. It works now.

I only hope it doesn’t burn the CPU out downloading all the updates.