Windows 7 XP Mode done and dusted

Cost extra?

This is a feature aimed at business and corporate customers, I sincerely hope they aren't running on the Home version!

To be honest, with XP, I always installed Professional on my home machines. Home should be dropped and everybody just gets Professional...

It was a complete pain with XP (and Vista was worse, but at least you had Ultimate in place Upgrade), where you could either select the hardware you wanted, with Home and then buy another copy of Professional, or you could buy the machine with the OS you wanted, then have to upgrade components to meet the spec you needed...

I think I ended up with 4 unused XP Home licences over the years and bought more than my fair share of XP Professional!

By big_D on 2 Oct 2009

Cost extra?

This is a feature aimed at business and corporate customers, I sincerely hope they aren't running on the Home version!

To be honest, with XP, I always installed Professional on my home machines. Home should be dropped and everybody just gets Professional...

It was a complete pain with XP (and Vista was worse, but at least you had Ultimate in place Upgrade), where you could either select the hardware you wanted, with Home and then buy another copy of Professional, or you could buy the machine with the OS you wanted, then have to upgrade components to meet the spec you needed...

I think I ended up with 4 unused XP Home licences over the years and bought more than my fair share of XP Professional!

By big_D on 2 Oct 2009

Security? What guff - sour grapes is more like it

There is nothing MORE secure than running a suspect file in Virtual PC with "Undo Disk" enabled, even if the machine doesn't have a virus checker.

Since you can install the FREE Microsoft security essentials (if your copy of Windows is legit) then I can't see a problem. So far, I haven't found any PC's in the office here that don't run Virtual PC (and some are creaking old).

Admittedly many councils (you know who you are!) are running Celeron's with 256Mb, shared video ram, 40Mb HD and XP SP1 - which probably cannot support VPC, but then realistically they should have upgraded those machines for XP!!

Since MS allowed up to three uses of the same XP key on the same machine with VPC 2007, I assume the same is true of W7VPC. Does anyone know?

By cheysuli on 2 Oct 2009

A very useful transition tool

Many small and medium organisations have old database apps (membership and contact management, spare parts, time recording..) that were written in 80's database systems like xBase, Superbase &c. Many of these simply wont install on Vista / Windows 7. An XP Virtual PC is a good transition tool for these users.
It's a sensible fix for a real problem. I have setup 2 local organisations with Vmware Player and XP on Vista to fix such problems. Windows 7 Pro will be a sensible upgrade path.

By milliganp on 2 Oct 2009

cheyulsi - "Admittedly many councils (you know who you are!) are running Celeron's with 256Mb, shared video ram, 40Mb HD and XP SP1 - which probably cannot support VPC"

Well with specs like that they won't be upgrading them to Win 7 anyway!

I have to say it does seem like a sensible solution, but fairly cynically executed. MS's requirements to use hardware virtualisation and require the more expensive variants of Win 7 are limitations of their own making - I can quite happily run Virtualbox with any OS and any CPU, and it integrates an awful lot better than "XP Mode" does (start menu launching of XP applications aside).

By halsteadk on 2 Oct 2009

For a moment I thought the title was suggesting that they'd got rid of XP mode from Windows 7. Unfortunately not.

By peterm2k on 2 Oct 2009

What's the problem with XP mode peterm2k? If you don't like it you don't have to install it. It's a seperate download

By TimoGunt on 2 Oct 2009

What's the problem with XP mode peterm2k? If you don't like it you don't have to install it. It's a seperate download

By TimoGunt on 2 Oct 2009

Couldn't do Vista, still can't 7

We still have an extensive XP user base and even an appreciable number of Win2000. Unlike some I cannot afford to renew hardware triennually automatically so XP has to do. Personally I have a friend who I set up a PC for his one man business as a WP station an he still uses it now. It is 10 years old and runs Ami-Pro. Seing as he is still using for the same job now as when it was new his argument is why should he change it?

By MIssingLink on 2 Oct 2009