That means Intel VT or AMD-V, which limits your choice dramatically - blogger Ed Bott has put together a list of Intel chips and their compatibility. XP Mode will only work on PCs with a CPU with hardware-assisted virtualisation support. It's two separate optional downloads - the Virtual PC software and the XP Mode VHD file.Īre there any special hardware requirements? Note that XP Mode isn't included 'in the box' with Windows 7. Vista and XP users are stuck with the old Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. But any Windows 7 user can download the Windows Virtual PC engine and create their own virtual machines if they have the necessary licences. Windows XP Mode will only work in Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise editions. Which versions of Windows 7 does it come with? You can install an OS on to this virtual PC and run it just like a separate standalone or networked PC on your 'real' Windows desktop. The virtual PC in effect 'borrows' your real PC's hardware, but has no direct access to the physical components - that's all handled by the virtualisation software. It has a virtual BIOS, a virtual graphics card, a virtual network card, a DVD drive - everything that a real PC has, in fact. Installation takes only a few minutes.Ī virtual PC is a bog-standard PC that's emulated in software.
With XP Mode, you get a pre-configured virtual hard disk (VHD) file, complete with a standard single-user licence. You'd also have to create the virtual machine yourself. Normally you'd need a separate licence to install and run XP in a virtual PC. Virtualisation may be old hat, but the novelty of XP Mode is that Microsoft is giving you a completely free extra operating system. Technically, it's a virtual machine (VM) powered by a brand-new version of the Windows Virtual PC virtualisation engine. Windows XP Mode is a full virtualised copy of Windows XP SP3, meaning Windows 7 runs the whole of XP within itself. But what is it, how does it work and is it really the magic bullet it claims to be? On paper, this gives the new OS 100 per cent backwards compatibility with XP, so you can run all your old software on Windows 7. When the release candidate build of Windows 7 appeared in May 2009, Microsoft surprised almost everyone by announcing a solution: Windows XP Mode. With Vista, the compatibility problems at launch were so great it never really stood a chance of convincing cautious consumers and ultra-conservative businesses, with the result that many of them are still happily running Windows XP.
The backwards compatibility of new operating systems has been a constant thorn in Microsoft's side.
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