Recently I talked about running ROMs and images as virtual machines (VM) on our phones. All of that is still in the early stages of development but running Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) on your Windows 7 PC is a reality today. Thanks to the free virtualization software VirtualBox by Oracle and Dinesh from the Sysprobs site you could load and run an ICS ROM on your PC. 
Dinesh runs the Sysprobs site and posts different virtual machine configurations and write ups all of the time. He did a great Hackintosh write up for how to run a Mac Lion image in VirtualBox that I run on my PC to test Mac apps and settings. He recently posted a way to run Ice Cream Sandwich in a VM. Running ICS on a PC is a great way to get familiar with the look and feel of Ice Cream Sandwich without having to buy a tablet or new phone. His site walks you through how to download and configure your computer to get the ROM running. If you have a Windows PC with free disk space and some time to set this up you can be testing ICS today.
He does mention that this is a 4.0.1 image that they are running. He goes on to say that the Android x86 project home has some ISO files to start from scratch with and some of the more ambitious readers out there may want to try and update the OS to 4.0.3 or 4.0.4. I have tried creating bootable images from the Android x86 site before without much success. Sysprobs' walkthroughs and recommended images have always worked for me in the past. If you just want to see what all of the ICS hype is about, this is the fastest way to try it. Running 4.0.1 will work fine for testing purposes.
I have run Gingerbread ROMs through VirtualBox and I was able to ADB on my PC through the virtual USB port to the ROM and push apps and updates to the VM. These are powerful tools, and once you get the image booting you can run this VM like it is a real device. This is geeky stuff! But for the enthusiast like many of us are, running a VM opens up a world of possibilities. You can snapshot the VM before doing anything potentially damaging and roll back to that snapshot if everything goes wrong. All of this will let you test without having to brick your phone or root any devices.
A couple of final notes on this. I found another blog with some more information about running the ROM. Between the two sites I think you should be able to successfully launch ICS on your desktop or laptop computer. The download of the VDI image is on a Japanese website. Google translated it but the big Download button is all you really need.
Head over to Sysprobs to get started with virtualization. These tools are free and the possibilities are unlimited.
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