Best Virtual drive for Win 7 Home Premium

I have Win 7 Home Premium. I need to try to run Win XP so that I can use my legacy scanner. I am looking for the best free Virtual drive software.

 

I have XP in both VirtualBox and VMWare in Win 7 x64 and VMWare has had the fewer problems, though both have been perfectly usable. VirtualBox has the big advantage of snapshots, so if you want to do a lot of what-iffing it's the better choice. Otherwise I don't think there's much between them, both being astonishingly capable.

 

I would like VMware but it is not free. I'll look into Virtual Box. Thanx

 

Yes it is free. At least VMPlayer is, though I haven't used it in six months or so, 3.01 I believe. You didn't say what CPU you have but if it has a virtualization section in the BIOS, then turn that on.

I really liked the VMWare Player as it even gave cross-platform pasting ability between Windows and a Linux distro and no need to hit Ctrl-G between OS's. That was/is an excellent feature! Very easy to install and use, basically a no-brainer.major

 

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

 

Yes, both are free, and both have this seamless transition between guest and host. There is even a Unity mode in VMWare Player which makes the individual apps and features of your VM available just like any other app on the Win 7 taskbar or start menu. It's all pretty amazing but it only works satisfactorily where you have sufficient RAM in the host machine to allocate between the two systems and neither be starved. For an XP VM running in Win 7 that means 2GB absolute minimum, but preferably 3+