Hyper-V Manager, VMs in Win10

Example scripts and tips (replaces Old Scripts & Tips archive)

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hagchr
Automation Wizard
Posts: 327
Joined: Mon Jul 05, 2010 7:53 am
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Hyper-V Manager, VMs in Win10

Post by hagchr » Tue Oct 06, 2015 6:54 pm

I recently upgraded from Win7 to Win10 (skipped Win8 completely) and am quite happy with it so far. MS is (still) working great.

Win10 (at least the professional version) comes with an app "Hyper-V Manager" which you can use to set up virtual machines (VM). Not really having an IT technical background, or used VMs before, I was surprised that it was quite straightforward to set up (still some problems accessing internet from the VM using Wi-Fi, but with wired connection, no problem).

I created a VM and installed a (separate) copy of Win10 , then experimented with running some MS scripts (compiled exe).

It was great to see that you can work at your (host) machine with MS doing its magic (image recognition, mouse moves, clicks etc etc) in the separate environment, without interference. Using a couple of shared folders it is easy to pass info between the environments.

Maybe obvious (?), but surprising to me, was that the VM still seems to run normally when you lock the screen on the host machine, ie you can still do GUI work in the VM when the (host) machine is screen-locked, which could be useful if you need to be away from the machine. I just ran an MS script in the VM that used image recognition and clicked its way through some screens and saved screenshots, all while the host screen was locked.

The examples I tried seemed to run slightly slower than when in the host environment, not sure if due to my set-up or machine-load, or typical for VMs in general. However, everything seems to be stable and robust, and no problems or crashes etc which are all key for me.

So if you need to do GUI and other work at the same time, and do not want several computers then this could be a solution.

(Since the VM is like a separate computer, you need to consider license requirements for the software you use, and weigh that against the advantages.)


If you have been using the VM in Hyper-V with MS, what is your experience?

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