Networking Virtual PC 2007 on Vista

I decided to forego the pleasure of a BIOS upgrade to my desktop and install Windows Server 2008 in a virtual environment - gotta love virtualisation!!

Well, the install went very well and took less than 30 minutes even with the lack of resources.

Firs thing first, my desktop is currently running on an USB wireless adapter from DLink with an wrong driver for Vista..yes i know, but apparently the one i have didn't have Vista support to start with so i went for another one and it worked. there's now a Vista driver available but i haven't bothered to upgrade seeing as the other driver is working just fine.

The problem i had was that VPC wouldn't use the network adapter. Regardless of what i tried (even turning on VM support on the adapter didn't work)..

So i crept off my high horse and asked Ken Schaefer what to do - incidentially he'd just had the same problem and informed me that i just needed to install the MS LoopBack Adapter, bridge the adapter with the USB adapter and it'd work.

So here's what you do to get it working:

1) open up the Device Manager

2) Rick-click on your computer name

You'll then see the Add Hardware wizard dialog:

3) Click "Next" which will bring up the first step..here you select "Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)"

4) Click "Next" and you'll get a list of "Hardware Types"..Here locate "Network Adapters"

5) Click "Next" and you'll get a list of Manufacturers, locate "Microsoft". The list on the right then fills with MSFT adapters. Locate "Microsoft Loopback Adapter" in the list and click "Next" again.

6) You'll get the confirmation screen, click "Next" and you're good to go.

Once that's done you simply just have to bridge the Loopback Adapter with your USB wireless Adapter. Be patient as it takes a few seconds before it's located your workgroup/domain..If you don't have DHCP running you need to ensure that you assign the right IP address to your Loopback adapter.

That's it - in less than 5 minutes i was up and running with a working network connection.

Thanks again goes to Ken Schaefer for this little tip.