Windows XP Mode skips virtualisation hardware requirements Microsoft pushed out a software update late last week that strips away some hardware requirements for running Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 computers, in a move designed to convince more SMBs to upgrade their operating systems. The software maker said Windows XP Mode no longer needed hardware virtualisation technology to run …
Nice:
I Just kit-bashed a rather nice HP Mini Desktop together. It Runs Windows 7 very well (With 2GB of Memory and a decent half height nvidia card), but as it's built around a Core Duo System, there was No Intel VT.
This was irritating notso much for Windows XP Mode, but for Windows Virtual PC: Not that anyone ever mentions it, but you can also install and build any guest OS From scratch, much Like Virtual PC 2007.
So, gonna try getting some old Win98 Apps running in a virtual box on this new update, Will post back on secuess, and performance.
Does this mean there was collusion between Microsoft and chip manufacturers to get businesses to buy processors which supported hardware virtualisation? When this effort failed (as VMWare supported XP Mode without the hardware requirement), they decided to release virtualisation for all?
It's all down to the OEMs; Dell Vostros for instance, ship with CPUs that are VT capable but their BIOS lacks the lines of code required to switch it on!!!! The only reasons I can think they've done it are the cost of wiriting the BIOS update (unlikely), ineptitude (probable) or to increase their product range (bingo!).
"If you need a seriously powerful machine buy this Vostro, but if you want VT as well well let me show you this instead......"
"But it's £500 more!"
"Yeah, suck it n00b!"
Personally I think MS were beyond utterly moronic to use a hypervisor that required VT for Win7 as the whole point of the feature was to allow people to migrate WITHOUT shelling out on expensive new hardware!
A lot of machines use the intel chipsets are incapable of running Intel-VT because INTEL do not allow it. Out of a possible 25 Core 2 chipsets only 7 support virtualization.
I just went through an ordering process where Intel-VT was a requirement. The number of suppliers who offered me machine whose processor was fine but the chipset was not was a joke.
Now I want to hit someone from microsoft for making this change. I welcome it, I just wished I had known about it 2 weeks ago!
(ps the fail is for Intel)
'Personally I think MS were beyond utterly moronic to use a hypervisor that required VT for Win7 as the whole point of the feature was to allow people to migrate WITHOUT shelling out on expensive new hardware!'
Nope. The point was to run windows XP only applications, on Windows 7. Nothing to do with performance.
So I have my P5q Deluxe Quad core gaming machine and I did read the box the motherboard came in and it does support VM in the BIOS and I checked and made sure it was
turned on in the bios and oh reader beware I have WIndwos 7 professional 64bit with 4 gig of ram installed....
So before this update I download and install everything and it says my hardware does not support any VM...... WEIRD! BS!! IT DOES TOO!
So I got this update and it now works like a champ.
I wish that someone would notice that you don't need the high end versions of Windows 7 to run 'XP Mode'
XP Mode is two seperate bits. The first, which is the latest version of Virtual PC will install on all versions of Windows 7.
The only reason you need Professional, Enterprise or Ulimate is to get the licence for the Windows XP that is in 'XP Mode' OS image
So if you can provide the XP OS install yourself - then you can do 'XP mode' yourself.
I've done this on Home Premium and it works exactly the same - seamless intergration and everything
Download and install the MS VM. Then download and install VMWare player and have a virtualisation environment that doesn't bring the host OS to it's knees, integrates better and feels much faster and more usable. VM even has a special "import XP mode" option in the menu to make this as easy as possible.
As title, really. Got a Win7 machine that runs on some beefy, but slightly older processors - no hardware virtualisation. I can easily use Virtualbox for XP and do so, but I really want a Win98 image on there for some stuff. Does this mean I can now use VPC?
It seems to me like overkill to have to resort to a full machine virtualization (with or without hardware support) in order to provide backwards compatibility with a slightly older version of what is essentially the same OS. How many XP apps actually break when run on Win 7 anyway?
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