Sunday, April 26, 2009

Windows XP Mode for Windows 7

Windows XP Mode is specifically designed to help small businesses move to
Windows 7. Windows XP Mode provides you with the flexibility to run many older
productivity applications on a Windows 7 based PC.

All you need to do is to install suitable applications directly in
Windows XP Mode which is a virtual Windows XP environment running under Windows
Virtual PC. The applications will be published to the Windows 7 desktop and then
you can run them directly from Windows 7.

Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC are best experienced on your new
Windows 7 PC. We will be soon releasing the beta of Windows XP Mode and Windows
Virtual PC for Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate.

The above quote is from the Windows Team blog. Basically, this is what many people have been asking about for quite some time - a way to run existing applications in a virtualized Windows XP as part of Windows 7 (and previously, Vista). This is an updated Virtual PC instance running in a way similar to how the "unity mode" of VMWare Fusion and Workstation 6.5 works. Unlike VMWare Workstation 6.5, however, VXP will require Hyper-V capable hardware - VT support in the motherboard, BIOS and CPU will all need to be present and enabled for this to work.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

1 comment:

JamesB said...

However as released in RC XPM is the likely cause of Virtual Server getting a Compatibilty Block so if your a power user your stuck with XP VM's and nothing else unless you run VMWare.

I can't imagine Win7 would ship and not be able to run VM's with Virtual Server so I will assume either they fix Win7 XPM to allow Virtual Server to run without a problem, update Virtual Server or have a switch to allow you to disable XPM in favour of Virtual Server. Really surprised RC1 was pushed out with this issue.