Friday, March 19, 2010

XP Mode No Longer Requires Hardware Virtualization Support

Good news - it seems that Microsoft has finally realised that not every SMB has kickass machines on/under their desks. When XP Mode was initially released, Microsoft made VT support a requirement - if your motherboard, BIOS and CPU didn't all have Hardware Assisted Virtualization support available and enabled, you were unable to run Virtual PC on Windows 7, which meant that you couldn't run XP Mode.

Now, as I posted on March 7, 2010, you could have XP virtualization on Windows 7 without needing hardware virtualization support if you were willing to look to the industry leader in Virtualization - VMWare and use their VMWare Player product, or even Sun's VirtualBox.

It seems that Microsoft has seen people moving from native Microsoft Windows 7 tools to their big competitor in Virtualization and decided that this isn't good for business, so they have now released an update to Virtual PC that removes the Hardware Assisted Virtualization prerequisite.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

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