I’ve bitten the bullet and recently installed Windows 7 on my laptop.  Visually it’s an improvement over Windows XP and its much more user friendly as well. But I’ve used Windows XP for many years as it’s been tried, tested and proven to work with most software applications.

So to get the best of both worlds I’ve decided to download and install Microsoft Virtual PC and install Windows XP on it.  Sounds easy enough and completed it in a flash but I discovered that I couldn’t connect to the Internet within the VPC.

If you’re like me and have problems connecting your Virtual PC to the Internet you might have been searching around for a useful guide for getting this done.  After spending quite a while searching for this myself I found this Virtual PC Internet Configuration Guide from CJ to be the easiest to follow.  It’s structured in a step-by-step fashion and has a lot of pictures.

Make sure that after you follow the instructions on CJ’s guide that you perform the following to renew your ip address:

1 – Within your Windows XP virtual PC click on Start then Run

2 – Type cmd in the Run dialog box

3 – At the command prompt type ipconfig/release and press enter on the keyboard

4 – At the command prompt type ipconfig/renew and press enter on the keyboard

If you followed CJ’s Virtual PC Internet configuration guide and followed the tip above you should have the internet up and running on your virtual pc in a few minutes.