Virtual PC: Gone in a flash

Thanks to products like VMware Pocket ACE, the soul of your PC can be reduced onto the likes of an 8 GB memory stick.

That fact struck home the other day when VMWare executive Jerry Chen dropped by the Computerworld offices to talk about the future of PC virtualization.

At the end of the meeting he tossed me an 8GB Kingston USB stick containing a virtual PC running uBuntu and Open Office. Today you don't need hardware to have a PC. Your complete operating environment can live on a memory stick, which is great for a wandering tech who doesn't want to shlep around a laptop. Just add hardware and you're up and running, right? Maybe not.

Shortly after Chen left I was on the phone with Chad Mawson, IT manager for the law firm Woods & Aitken LLP. Chad had been experimenting with a Windows virtual PC on a USB stick. It's handy, he agrees, when you need to go around supporting people's machines but need something that's back on your laptop. Within seconds he could reach into his pocket, jack in the USB key and bring up his own virtual PC, complete with applications and data, on any user's machine.

The virtual PC was easy to use. But it was also too easy to lose.

One day, he accidentally formatted his virtual PC. Like many IT folks, he has a drawer full of USB keys with others scattered about. "I had about ten USB keys on my desk and someone needed one in a hurry," Mawson says. So he picked up the nearest key, which happened to contain his virtual PC.

"I nuked it and I didn't have a backup," he says. In a FLASH, his entire work environment -- OS, applications and data -- disappeared forever. And that, he says, was the last time he used a virtual PC.