A twisted version of fun - publishing applications from a Longhorn virtual machine on my laptop and running those apps on my host Windows XP

I've been tinkering with Longhorn quite a bit after hours when I get pockets of free time. If you do it right, you can almost convince people you are running Vista on your XP laptop due to how seemless the windows applications look.

If I really wanted to go all out, of course, I could install Vista on the laptop but I'd much rather do it this way for now. Vista sound drivers are still in development due to the API/engine overhaul (for the good) that happened in Vista. It was always one of my biggest pet peeves that there wasn't a decent way for applications to have different volume levels.

I used to "sort-of" get around it way back when with 2 different Sound Blaster 16 cards in one machine, with one output going into the input of the other one, like the old Adlib or Gravis Ultrasound cards. Unfortunately, back then, many programs did not know how to handle the fact that there were multiple mixers and output devices available under Windows.

OS/2 would handle it fine but by the time OS/2 4.0 came out, there were a whopping 10 applications native to OS/2 (just kidding). OS/2 was a great operating system to run a DOS based BBS on if you only had one machine overall. Running a multiline Renegade BBS became possible and tolerable with that OS.

Back on topic though, Longhorn really is looking like it will be a Citrix killer.