24
Apr 2009
148 Comments
Secret No More: Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7

Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott reveal a new Windows 7 application compatibility feature called Windows XP Mode. Yes, it’s that “secret new feature” you’ve been hearing about…

Over a month ago, we were briefed about a secret Microsoft technology that we were told would be announced alongside the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) and would ship in final form simultaneously with the final version of Windows 7. This technology, dubbed Windows XP Mode (XPM, formerly Virtual Windows XP or Virtual XP, VXP), dramatically changes the compatibility story for Windows 7 and, we believe, has serious implications for Windows development going forward. Here’s what’s happening.

XPM is built on the next generation Microsoft Virtual PC 7 product line, which requires processor-based virtualization support (Intel and AMD) to be present and enabled on the underlying PC, much like Hyper-V, Microsoft’s server-side virtualization platform. However, XPM is not Hyper-V for the client. It is instead a host-based virtualization solution like Virtual PC; the hardware assistance requirement suggests this will be the logical conclusion of this product line from a technological standpoint. That is, we fully expect future client versions of Windows to include a Hyper-V-based hypervisor.

Figure 1 – Windows XP Mode running Microsoft Word 2003 under Windows XP and Word 2007 under Windows 7.

XP Mode consists of the Virtual PC-based virtual environment and a fully licensed copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3). It will be made available, for free, to users of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions via a download from the Microsoft web site. (That is, it will not be included in the box with Windows 7, but is considered an out-of-band update, like Windows Live Essentials.) XPM works much like today’s Virtual PC products, but with one important exception: As with the enterprise-based MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization) product, XPM does not require you to run the virtual environment as a separate Windows desktop. Instead, as you install applications inside the virtual XP environment, they are published to the host (Windows 7) OS as well. (With shortcuts placed in the Start Menu.) That way, users can run Windows XP-based applications (like IE 6) alongside Windows 7 applications under a single desktop.

Obviously, XPM has huge ramifications for Windows going forward. By removing the onus of legacy application compatibility from the OS, Microsoft can strip away deadwood technology from future versions of Windows at a speedier clip, because customers who need to run older applications can simply do so with XPM. For Windows 7 specifically, XPM is a huge convenience, especially for Microsoft’s corporate customers, who can of course control XPM behavior via standard Microsoft administration and management technologies like Active Directory (AD) and Group Policy (GP). And it significantly recasts the Windows 7 compatibility picture. Before, Microsoft could claim that Windows 7 would be at least as compatible as Windows Vista. Now, they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications.

We’ve both been using and testing Virtual XP for over a month and we we’ve been dying to communicate what we’ve discovered, as you might imagine. So here’s what you can expect. Paul will publish a high-level screenshot gallery on the SuperSite for Windows showing off Windows XP Mode and what it’s like to run Windows XP and Windows 7 applications side-by-side. On Within Windows, Rafael will provide a deep technical dive into Windows XP Mode and explain how it works and how you can make it work the way you want. Later, Paul will add a Windows XP Mode article to his Windows 7 Feature Focus series as well. And of course we’ll be covering this feature in-depth in “Windows 7 Secrets,” which will be published by Wiley & Sons later this year.

Thanks for reading!

Paul and Rafael

  • http://www.laslow.net Laslow

    Holy crap! This further justifies buying Windows 7 Ultimate for my workstation! Can’t wait to see the write-ups on it!

  • kL

    Cool. I’ll be able to copy the VM and run it on Mac OS X, having same 100% compatibility story :)

  • Darren Tebo

    I had a feeling that something like this was the secret. :) This is huge! Thank you Rafael and Paul Thurrott for revealing this information. :)

  • Daniel

    100% compatibility, does that include 3D acceleration? AKA games.

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  • ctan

    Er, what prevents you from just creating a Windows XP VM in Mac OS X now? You’d have immediate 100% compatibility with Windows XP software.

  • Greg

    So there are going to be different releases such as Ultimate, Enterprise, Home. Hello Ubuntu….Microsoft just gave you a pricing level gift.

  • Jon

    Been doing this for a year on Debian with seamless-RDP to a windows 2003 machine at work. It worked so well that now more than twenty of our new employees are also using Debian with seamless-RDP to a couple of legacy apps that only run on windows (though one may be ported to GNU/Linux with DOSbox). I’m glad to see microsoft is beginning to catch up.

  • Asbjørn Rune Riis-Knudsen

    Wow!! This is great. Microsoft really is listening. Ever since i first heard of MED-V, I was wondering why ordinary users weren’t getting it. Now I know. This is really great and yet another reason to upgrade to Windows 7.

  • Splat

    Wow awesome job Microsoft. Now all those Windows XP viruses will still work!

  • Ty Miles

    Didn’t Apple do this like 10 years ago when they had classic mode in OS X 10.0 to 10.1?

    What if your PC doesn’t processor-based virtualization support? Then you don’t get this (Sounds like they are hoping people will buy new PC’s just to keep access to your XP apps)

    Also I wonder how well your XP apps will work? Can you game?

  • Captain Spicard

    @ctan
    Because barely anybody who only wants to update their myspace, make crappy “music” in garageband, look cool in starbacks, wear turtleneck sweaters, and spend two-four times as much as they would for a regular PC wants to use a Fagintosh.

    And some wonder why nobody uses hackintoshes…

  • Captain Spicard

    @Splat

    Sure is macfag in here.

  • John Frum

    Ty, give that thought 2 seconds to bake before clicking the submit button.

    Do you really think people with old hardware are going to be upgrading to Win7? The point is so that when they do buy a new PC which will come with Win7 they can still run the old poorly written apps that only work on XP.

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  • arbo distro

    Wow this is so awesome!!! No one has to rewrite all those viruses for windows 7–they come along for the ride courtesy of microsoft. Now if they come up with a Windows 7 Ultimate Build VM they can port all the viruses from win 3.0 all the way to up to ME!!!

  • http://www.infobyte.org Shane Phillips

    John, there are also some old games that don’t work in Vista, the original Trackmania game is a good example, the writers just never introduced updated Starforce drivers for it, meaning it is broken in Vista, and with this update we will be able to run it again with full desktop support.

    @Splat: Although it will actually allow applications to interact with your desktop, the OS will still run in a virtualised environment, and will not be able to infect your native Windows 7 installation. In the unlikely event of the VM becoming affected, it will be a simple case of remove the VM and replace it with the original copy, restoring the default config.

    @Rafael… Do you know if this will be made available for testing in the RC of Windows 7, or is it not likely to hit release before 7′s RTM?

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  • Brandon

    Hm, could get around Punkbuster being stupid with this.

  • Brandon

    I forgot to ask, will this be available for download before RTM?

  • neo7

    Will the virtual XP PC emulate a crappy video card or give XP under Win7 full access of the real card, to be fully recognized as such by XP apps? That’s my problem with the current Virtual PC under Win7: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

  • http://www.pretentiousname.com Leo Davidson

    @Shane Phillips:

    “In the unlikely event of the VM becoming affected, it will be a simple case of remove the VM and replace it with the original copy, restoring the default config.”

    And losing all the files you had edited in the VM in the process, if the virus hadn’t already trashed/infected them.

    (Or, if the files are stored on the host OS then the VM must have access to the host filesystem, which means the virus would as well.)

    VMs are just like extra computers on your network that share the same keyboard/screen/CPU/memory of another computer. Nothing more or less really. They won’t magically make viruses irrelevant. You could equally say that if a virus hits your desktop then you can simply reformat it and reinstall Windows. The problem in both cases if that you lose all your data. (Or the virus sends your private data to someone else.)

    That said, you can be smart and deny the VM network access, except to occasionally update Windows, and only copy files into or out of the VM explicitly (rather than leaving folders shared in either direction). Then it’s pretty isolated from viruses getting in or out… If one does get in, though, then you’re just as screwed as if it was a real machine.

    (This is all assuming that this feature is basically a repackaged version of Virtual PC. Maybe there’s more to it than that.)

    As someone who has used Virtual PC and VMWare for yeas now, and finds them invaluable, this seems like a good idea, but also an old idea. The “free” XP licence is what interests me most so far. Then I can retire the XP laptop I only keep around for testing stuff on. :)

    Does anyone know if this will let you run 32bit XP on 64bit Windows 7, and/or vice versa? Last I looked at Virtual PC it couldn’t do that which was one of the two reasons I switched from the free VPC to pro version of VMWare. (There are things I like and dislike about both VPC and VMWare so anyone undecided should definitely check out both. VMWare does more but if you don’t need that extra stuff you may find VPC has lower overheads and fewer background tasks spamming Process Monitor 24/7. So long as you don’t run into the second reason I ditched VPC: There was (maybe still is, but this was a year or two ago so I hope not!) a conflict between VPC and the nForce ethernet drivers that neither NVidia nor MS seemed to want to fix. Caused my PC to completely lock up on some boots and take several minutes to connect to the network on others. Quite frustrating!)

  • Fredrik

    Does this mean that the 16-bit software that can run in Windows XP, will run in 64-bit Windows 7? Like the Lucasarts game installers from the late 1990s, such as Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.

  • http://yertblog.blogspot.com Yert

    @Ty Miles: Yes, but they removed Classic Mode when they made the move to Intel based chips. PowerPC support is being dropped too. Apple is known for slowly phasing out backwards compatibility, but as I’m sure you’ll find, it is less important to Mac users then it is to Windows users.

  • http://miretank.deviantart.com Rodrigo

    That’s VERY interesting. Will run like VMWare Fusion/Unity from what I see.

    Wonder if it will run XP’s Explorer.

  • http://hitekreview.blogspot.com Kawazoe Masahiro

    Well, it look to me that Windows 7 will just be a Windows XP R2. Yes there is some nice features that was added but they dropped 90% of what was new to the end user on Vista. I see the newspaper first page from here : “Since a big majority of people is to stupid to evolve to a new OS, Microsoft will release Windows XP for the next 100 years…”. The hell! They even give you a free Windows XP licence with it! Just to say : “Windows 7 is bad, use XP instead”. One more reason to use OS X. At least, you can do something with it and not just wasting your time at doing defrag (that one was for Capitain Spicard. By the way, no one use hackintosh because they pay for the real thing)

    @John Frum
    Ty was right. Many people still don’t have intel-vt or an equivalent. It’s not even about old hardware. If you pay less than $ 800 for you desktop computer then you don’t have any virtualisation technology with you CPU. On the other side, the idea of Windows 7 is that people with older hardware do to switch to “Vista” which they didn’t because of it’s “bad” perfomances.

    @neo7
    No. At this time, only VMware managed to get hardware accelerated graphics on Windows and they are not working very well… Even if there is support for Direct X 9.0c, there is not even 20 software that run well with it. For instance, SimCity 4 will not work very well and there is even softwares like Safari 4 that will freeze the whole VM when they start to use 3D.

  • http://hitekreview.blogspot.com Kawazoe Masahiro

    @ Yert
    It’s not that backward compatibility is less important. It is simply not needed. Since developpers care about the users, they update their app when needed.

  • http://knoopx.net knoopx

    running windows xp under windows 7 a killer feature? seriously, i dont get the point. i think i should start smoking crack.

  • Jim

    Laughing at your quote:

    “Since a big majority of people is to stupid to evolve to a new OS, Microsoft will release Windows XP for the next 100 years…”.

    …a big majority of people is to….

    hrmmmm

  • xxxxxxx

    But this doesn’t do anything for compatibility of drivers, right? Is it possible to have, for example, an XP printer driver installed in the XP VM and print to it from Win7 apps?

  • http://www.infobyte.org Shane Phillips

    Leo

    I am sure they have a way to isolate the VM and stop it damaging your physical installation, but at the end of the day if you have antivirus protection, anything trying to spread itself onto your physical installation should be caught, and that is assuming it gets past UAC for those who have it enabled.

  • The Crab

    Where does that leave us with Multi-Media computers?

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  • http://www.jesuspresley.net Jesus Presley

    WTF? A Windows emulation for Windows?

  • WayneB

    @the very few, very loud Mac fags: Your os is not secure, it’s just that not enough people use it for any virus authors to care about you. Stop lying to yourselves.

    Windows has been doing backwards compatibility better than any other OS for years. Why? Because they /didn’t/ do it with a VM 10 years ago like Apple. Apple’s backward compat sucks compared to Windows. I know people that are still running DOS accounting software in XP that was made 15 years ago.

    So why are they switching to using a VM now? The hardware is ready. Intel has been adding VM features to it’s CPU’s, dual cores is common and hardware is fast enough to run XP in a VM really well.

  • http://saulosilva.com Saulo Silva

    Wow, that’s quite impressive. I can’t wait to get my hands on Windows 7–and I say that while having Vista as my main OS (I have no complaints though). Windows 7 is the new XP.

  • Jeff Little

    Cool all the cool stuff of an New OS plus you get to keep all the viruses from the current one!
    Rock On

  • Jeff Little

    @the very few, very loud Mac fags: Your os is not secure, i.. BLA BLA BLA

    Hey Shit head
    Photoshop .97 beta still runs on my few year old iMac Thats 22 year old program in my book.
    Again PC Loser lies…

    Programmable viruses watch next for the PC?

  • http://aurorafx.wordpress.com Haimin

    Dude, this article is not about Macs. Yeah, PC are losers, right? Mac OS X runs off UNIX, which is almost 40 years old. Very modern.

    Cool, XP on 7. It won’t be much use to consumers, though. It would be great for developers. Microsoft is awesome, and admit it, Windows 7 is now oficially 100% 2001 compatabile, so the idiots who moan about compatability can shut up.

  • WayneB

    Yeah, uhhh it’s pretty well known that Apple generally sucks at backwards compatibility.

    Let’s talk hardware, lol. I can run XP on a 233mhz processor from 1995. You?

  • Me

    Wow, very disappointed and not worth the fabricated hype. Yay, lets privide a virtual PC image of windows XP touting something that VMware can already do. From all the responses from the start of the hype, it’s quite obvious that THIS is not what people want.

    Hence, I reckon the reason why it’s a separate download, and really shouldn’t be tailored to Windows 7 at all. It’s no feature of Windows 7.

    Now to clean up my word vomit amongst other things.

  • Tom

    Yet another reason to be an AMD partisan. It’s quite easy to get AMD-V even on $400 consumer PCs, if only because AMD does a lot less market segmentation than Intel.

    Leo, Virtual PC 2007 has supported 32-bit XP on 64-bit VPC ever since it came out (February 2007). Works whether you’re hosting on Vista or 7. It’s 64-bit guests that don’t work (requires Hyper-V). Since 64-bit XP was a niche product, it is quite likely that this product will be based on 32-bit XP. Vista was the big step up for everyday 64-bit.

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  • Kevin

    I don’t know anyone who uses anything from Microsoft anymore. I only know a few people who use Macs. Everyone I know uses Ubuntu these days. I find myself reading about Windows 7 with a detached kind of curiosity. I wonder why anyone would want to mess with any of this when they could have something that just works, and have it for free. I’m no Linux fanboy, don’t get me wrong. I just like things that work. I used to keep Wine, Vmware, and VirtualBox around, just in case I needed something that would only work with Windows. It has been two years since I even bothered to put any of them on a machine.

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  • Joe Menges

    Realistically is hardware GPU acceleration that important for Windows XP Mode in Windows 7? Maybe it depends on what games you play, but I find most work fine natively on Windows 7.

    Hardware GPU acceleration is more important for VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X, since it allows Windows games to play on Mac where they wouldn’t before. Performance isn’t there yet for hardware GPU acceleration although it’s workable for some older, less intensive games and has certainly improved since last year. Both Fusion and Parallels offer Coherence and Unity features respectively to hide the Windows desktop and integrate Windows applications into the OS X environment and it’s very useful. It’s great that Windows is adopting the technology to offer better backwards compatibility in Windows 7 with Windows XP. Someone should really find out whether Virtual Windows XP will be available to Home Premium edition users or below, even if it’s at extra cost. I can’t see any technical reason to prevent it, so it’d probably only be a monetary thing.

  • RobertC

    WayneB, you could load XP on a 233mhz PC but it might take you in the order of 15 years…..lol

    That said, the main beneficiaries out of XP mode are enterprise customers. A lot of enterprise software is not compatible with Vista for various reasons and that is why enterprise customers have stuck with XP. Microsoft has solved that problem now.

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  • Sirikan

    Wonder if they have 3D Acceleration working in it like vmware has now (hopefully better).

  • kdawg

    a lot of you seem to be missing the point….in the longer term…this theoretically allows Microsoft to get rid of tons of JUNK in the main OS kept around to deal with “compatibility”…which should allow their OSes to be slimmed down, streamlined, and cleaned up (much of what Windows 7 is I suppose)—which should just improve stability and performance in general.

    …this is sort of like how Apple, and even Microsoft dealt with migrations to OSX and NT during their initial releases (yeah I’m 900 years old)…there had to be compatibility layers developed to allow users to run older software (maybe not THAT important for consumers but very important for corporations)…by using VMs to do this it gives them confidence of 100% compatibility while having the nice side effect of being able to keep that “compatibility” stuff isolated from the newer parts of the system.

    this move bodes really well for future Windows Releases…the ability to innovate “safely”

  • Tyrune

    Talk about bringing the dead back to life…
    Connectix, the company Microsoft purchased and turned into VirtualPC used to have a wildly cool level of integration with Mac OS, in their Windows-On-Mac virtualization product.

    The feature allowed you to install Windows Apps (Like Outlook for proper Exchange connectivity) that would register themselves in the Launcher.

    It worked a lot like VMware’s current Unity feature, but the integration into the host was much tighter.
    Glad to see they’re finally putting some of that IP they acquired to good use.

  • Rahul

    it was indeed a wonderful technology & would eliminate need to run 2 simultaneous windows using virtual PC 2007. its great for backward compatibility. many people still dont have hardware assisted virtualization technology so its requirement for the same doesn’t make sense. the processor like pentium 4 makes the windows 7 works very smoothly but dont have hardware virtualization. same goes with netbooks running on atom processor.

  • Brady

    You’re all crazy!
    I’ve been installing XP apps under Win7 with no problems ‘cept for the beta Boxee.
    The whole hackintosh scene is stuck in a time warp. Why use new hardware to run an outdated OS?
    Any install of tinyXP will kick your mac ass.
    Ubuntu’s just as sorry.
    Though Mepis is very respectable.
    Fanboys crawl out from under your rock and try a new OS.
    Don’t be scared. Really.
    I installed Word 2003 under Win7 last month without consulting anyone,
    because, honestly, open office kinda sucked.

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  • Sirikan

    @kdawg yeah and see more minwin type stuff but done on different components of windows :).

  • http://www.windowssite.de.tl Vincent Bethmann

    So it’s a bit like VMwares “Unity” feature, but even better?

  • whats the big deal

    so whats the big deal here?

    many of us or pretty much everybody already has a legit winxp license or even other licenses. simply install em in some virtualization within win7 and you are done. no big deal.

    only interesting question on this microsoft version would be if that virtualized xp is really truly a fully working winxp (professional?) and if i can for example turn off all those pest effects that came with winxp back then. i always liked the win2k normal mode of windows, no rounded corners, no fading effects and no big red Xes or useless graphical waste.

    the whole os ever became more and more bloated since those alpha blending effects on the desktop from win2k even.

    too bad that win7 continues this stuff to the max and i wonder how people work these days when they need to wait for fading effects, windows to fade in, blending, animation and crap.

    once you are on narrowband, gsm or slower and need to do rdp and such, you are cursing even more as you can never get as clean and quick desktop as it used to be with win2k.

    this path all these OSes are heading down to clearly sucks in my opinion.

  • Indrek

    Ooh, this is awesome. But it also raises a lot of questions:

    1. Will this work with Windows 7 RC?
    2. Will this work on earlier versions of Windows, like Vista?
    3. Will I be able to “decouple” the included XP, to maybe install from a customised (read: nLite’d) install CD? Or maybe install another version of Windows, like 2000? Or, perchance, even a non-Windows OS?
    4. Will I be able to use an existing .vhd (with either WinXP or another OS installed) with this?
    5. If no to all of the above, will this feature be available in the vanilla Virtual PC?
    6. Will this absolutely require hardware assisted virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V)? While pretty much every new AMD CPU has it, the Intel owners with lower-end chips would be out of luck. Virtual PC 2007 runs fine without it, though, if a little sluggishly.
    7. Will one be able to choose where to place the actual virtual machine files (like, on a separate hard drive, for better performance)?
    8. Will one be able to choose exactly which applications to publish from the virtual XP to the host OS?
    9. One of the screenshots in Paul’s gallery shows a USB menu, for attaching various USB devices (storage or otherwise) to the virtual XP. Will one be able to also attach, say, Firewire, eSATA or Bluetooth devices? Or (for laptop owners) Cardbus or ExpressCard devices, or even built-in devices like webcams and fingerprint readers?

    Tom: “It’s 64-bit guests that don’t work (requires Hyper-V).”
    It’s my understanding that you can run 64-bit guests on a 32-bit host provided you have a 64-bit CPU with AMD-V or Intel VT support.

  • http://alanhogan.com Alan Hogan

    1) Looks a lot like Parallels’ Exposé (2007?) or VMWare’s Fusion (2008?) mode of just cutting out the background, thus making windows [cap. intentional] from other operating systems appear in the same space as native windows.

    2) Clever? This isn’t clever at all. Apple has done this at least twice before: Once when moving from System 7 to OS X (a COMPLETELY new core *and* UI) and once when switching processor designs (PPC to i386, meaning no binary could possibly run without virtualization).

    Unless I am mistaken, this isn’t an entirely new core. Clever? Elegant? No, run-of-the-mill.
    Even better: Their “clever” solution is built on the Virtual PC technology that Microsot purchased from Connectix in 2003.

    When you hear Microsoft, you shouldn’t assume *anything* original.

    3) Also, let’s not forget virtualized apps run slower, with more memory.

    4) Why is this even necessary, if Vista runs XP programs, and 7 runs Vista crap?

  • http://alanhogan.com Alan Hogan

    Wow, can someone restore my faith in humanity by pointing out an anti-Apple comment here that doesn’t use the word “fag”? Grow up, boys.

  • Andrew

    Do you have any idea how ugly this font is that you use on this site.

  • DJ

    What I still wonder is if 3d games and such will run on this XPM .. That is a big question ..

  • http://www.pretentiousname.com Leo Davidson

    @Shane Phillips
    “I am sure they have a way to isolate the VM and stop it damaging your physical installation”

    VMs are already very isolated. (There is the occasional bug where malware in a VM can “break out” but they are rare and it’s even more rare for anything to bother exploiting them.)

    BUT, if you do anything useful in your VM — i.e. write documents or whatever — then the VM has to either contain or have access to (some of) your documents/files/data.

    If you get a virus in the VM then those documents/files/data are vulnerable, the same as on a real machine. You are no more or less protected by the fact that it is a VM.

    “but at the end of the day if you have antivirus protection, anything trying to spread itself onto your physical installation should be caught”

    Yes. It’s the same as if a machine on your network gets infected and touches files that are shared with/from your own machine.

    “and that is assuming it gets past UAC for those who have it enabled.”

    UAC isn’t much/any protection against malware which aims to damage or take your files (unless you permission them so that only admins can read/write them, which I do do with some of my more sensitive stuff, but then you have to run all programs that use those files as admin as well).

    When it comes to malware the most important thing that UAC does, IMO, is make it harder for malware to install itself as a rootkit so that anti-virus won’t be able to find it even after a signature update.

    (And that’s why I still think it’s important that Windows 7′s default UAC mode is so easy for malware to bypass the moment it wants to, with zero user interaction, without even having to wait for the user to do something it knows how to piggyback on like it had to on Vista.)

    @Tom
    “Leo, Virtual PC 2007 has supported 32-bit XP on 64-bit VPC ever since it came out (February 2007).”

    Ah, cool. That’s good to know, and I imagine running 64-bit Win7, with 32-bit XP inside of it will be the most common scenario. At least, I hope so. It’s time to ditch 32-bit Windows (as the physical-hardware OS)!

    “It’s 64-bit guests that don’t work (requires Hyper-V). Since 64-bit XP was a niche product, it is quite likely that this product will be based on 32-bit XP. Vista was the big step up for everyday 64-bit.”

    That’s a really good point which had escaped me. Since this for running XP it doesn’t really matter if it lets you run 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts.

    Being able to do that in VMWare has been great for me, but only because it allowed me to test my code on a 64-bit Vista VM when my real machine was 32-bit Vista. It’s not particularly relevant to XP, you’re right.

    (If I reinstalled Vista today it’d be 64-bit for sure, and I plan to move to 64-bit Windows 7… but back in January 2007 when I installed Vista on my main machine, 64-bit was still a big unknown with even more driver issues than early 32-bit Vista so I didn’t risk it. 64-bit Vista works great now, though, and I use it on my recent laptop.)

  • http://www.pretentiousname.com Leo Davidson

    @DJ:
    “What I still wonder is if 3d games and such will run on this XPM .. That is a big question ..”

    It’s highly unlikely, unless MS’s Virtual PC team have something incredible that they have not yet announced. As someone said earlier in the comments, AFAIK the only VM for Windows that has any (announced) 3D support is VMWare and the state of that is very limited so far. It sounds like they plan to improve it, and hopefully Virtual PC will move in the same direction, but it’s very early days for 3D in VMs.

    I’m looking forward to the day when Aero/glass can run in VMs as not having it makes it difficult to test parts of applications on different versions of Vista/Win7 without installing them on physical hardware.

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  • Phobos

    Is this some kind of joke?… I can do the same or better using VirtualBox… and not only running windows, but almost anything I want

    Yes, it’s a good idea… no, it’s not a new invention

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  • Indrek

    When will the Apple/Linux apologists learn that it’s not about who did it first, it’s about who does it better.

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  • neo7

    Will the virtual XP PC only emulate a crappy video card or give virtual XP under Win7 full access to the real card/GPU and its features, to be fully recognized as such by XP 3D apps? That’s my problem with the current Virtual PC 2007 under Win7: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

  • jake

    how did this post end up to be a mac vs pc fight

    this is about being able to run xp on 7 right i dont know where mac or aple comes in

  • reptileqc

    Microsoft has an history of “pushing” and “tying” features for free to their operating system to try to gain market share and customer acceptance after another company has already came up with the technology and is threatening their monopoly.

    Some examples:
    Internet Explorer (browser tie-in / against Netscape)
    Windows Media Player (multimedia player tie in / against Real and AOL)
    Desktop Search (tie-in / against Google)
    I guess virtualization is the next thing…

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  • http://www.paq.ltd.uk Peter Cyriax

    That does look interesting.

    I had to read it several times to figure out what was actually on the table.

    Just to make sure I have it straight:

    XPM (XP Mode) works by running an actual copy of XP inside a Virtual Machine suported by Win7. That measn that the code of all the application interfaces supplied to applications running within XPM will be the same code as would be running an a native XP system. ?

    By contrast, the normal method of providing a 32bit environment is to put API entry points within the 32bit Application Virtual Machine ( a somewhat different sort of Virtual machine) which would then in turn call the new 64bit OS procedures to implement the relevant functions. ?

    The difference is that though the design/intent is the same in the latter case, the fact that it’s all new code means that subtle differences in behaviour can arise…

    Have I correctly understood?

    One key question immediately comes to mind:

    Can XPM, since it’s a genuine OS (despite the fact that it’s running inside a Virtual Machine under another OS) use the old 32bit XP device drivers for hardware where the 64bit drivers are unavailable or unstable.

    That would be (more than just) nice. In fact, the absence of this feature was argueably the biggest single factor in the poor take up of Vista in some makket sectors. There seems to be some confusion on this point:

    Quote:
    ——————————————————————————–

    they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications.

    ——————————————————————————–

    The confusion arises because “complete Windows XP compatability” would have to include the option to use XP 32bit drivers for hardware devices, whereas “compatability with … applications” is a pale shadow in comparison.

    I’d also be intereted to see whether each running 32bit application is running inside its own XPM Virtual machine, or whether there is one XPM Virtual Machine inside which each 32bit application runs, in its own (XP provided) Virtual Machine, and I’d also like to see how much Virtual Address Space is availalbe to applications running in XPM.

    And I’m sure there will be many more questions… a long journey… but it does look like we might at last be on the right road this time.

    Peter

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  • anonymous cowherd

    @Phobos:

    ”

    Is this some kind of joke?… I can do the same or better using VirtualBox… and not only running windows, but almost anything I want

    Yes, it’s a good idea… no, it’s not a new invention”

    I use VB as well… last I checked it did not put the guest’s applications in the hosts start-menu and *not* have to run in a separate instance.

    Seamless mode is nice, but buggy as hell (Especially the farther away you move from Windows). This looks to be more a free version of “unity”, only better (though limited to XP guests).

  • JohnB

    Don’t really care after I read about the vbootkit
    http://www.softsailor.com/news/1654-build.html

  • tux

    This is simply the next version of Virtual PC which adds native host OS integration (removes the desktop and start menu/taskbar from the guest OS). This should in an ideal scenario work with any OS, esp Vista, but Microsoft is trying to sell if off as an exclusive Windows 7 feature for business reasons. VMWare Workstation 6.5 released in September 2008 aleady does this (called Unity mode instead of XP Mode) and isn’t locked for Windows 7 hosts and Windows XP guests. Sadly, THIS WON’T GIVE ME BACK THE FEATURES REMOVED FROM WINDOWS VISTA OR WINDOWS 7 WITH NATIVE INTEGRATION. Users will still have to manage and patch this “Virtual XP”.

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  • http://techwalker.net Mark Schneider

    @JohnB
    “VBootKit 2.0 exploits a security issue and needs physical access to the computer, not being able to take control of it remotely”
    So what this exploit needs is physical access to your computer, in other words no BFD.
    Show me a OS that remains invulnerable to someone with access to the keyboard. Maybe read the article you’re quoting before shooting your mouth/ keyboard off.

  • Sekas

    This is fake.
    7100 build is RC and there is no such “secret” inside.

  • Indrek

    @Sekas:
    “This is fake.
    7100 build is RC and there is no such “secret” inside.”

    Read the article instead of making yourself look like an idiot. In particular, pay attention to the following:
    “It will be made available, for free, /—/ via a download from the Microsoft web site. (That is, it will not be included in the box with Windows 7, but is considered an out-of-band update, like Windows Live Essentials.)”

    Comprendez now?

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  • Dan

    “Daniel
    April 24, 2009 at 5:22 pm
    100% compatibility, does that include 3D acceleration? AKA games.”

    I would expect it NOT to, if I were you. But if it did, there’s no chance it would support OpenGL (OpenGL would be stuck using its software renderer) only Microsoft DirectX. Which would work for most games nowadays but it’s still worth noting. Plenty of classic games you’d need to run in a VM for compatibility anyway would be OpenGL. For OpenGL you could try VirtualBox which has experimental and temperamental but promising OpenGL acceleration in Windows 2000+ guests (I haven’t tried it in a Linux guest yet).

    Still the level of integration MS claims to have achieved is better than what any virtualization solution I’ve seen before has, although that’s partly because it’s targeted at a specific combination of host and guest OSs. However this integration might also render security applications somewhat useless (ie using the VM as a sandbox to execute questionable files to avoid contaminating the host OS… a virus may be programmed to look for and escape the sandbox using the integration).

    VirtualBox comes close to this level of integration with their seamless desktop. In addition using a WinVNC fork called MetaVNC can provided a similar effect for VMs or any MetaVNC server.

    But this seems to go a step further and provide shortcuts in the start menu for launching individual programs on the guest OS. I’d expect that the guest OS has also been tweaked to do stuff like autologon and keeping a guest profile for each host profile, and maybe we’ll see standard Open/Save dialog calls intercepted and redisplayed on the host OS. Still I can see users easily getting confused when saving files in the host/guest and not being able to access them on the other.

    I can’t wait to try this out, just to see how good they can get it.

  • chris

    I’m not a big fan of Microsoft – neither their products nor their policies. Even though I think that some of their products, such as the .NET platform, are actually very well engineered. That being said, I thing that this “WinXP Mode” thing is a very good and very sensible move. It brings benefits to all involved parties: It takes some of the burden of backward compatibility off the MS developer’s shoulders, and thus giving them the opportunity of a clean break with lots of outdated aspects of Windows. This way, MS will save a lot of money in the long run, AND it contributes to a better, more secure and reliable product. So everyone can be happy. :-)

  • ctan

    @Captain Spicard

    My comment was directed towards kL

  • ctan

    @Captain Spicard

    Sure is full of 4chan in here. I don’t even own a Mac, no need to attack people, alright?

  • Johnny Appleseed

    @Indrek

    The Mac and Linux “apologists” have nothing to apologize for. As for doing it better rather than first, that’s usually Apple’s approach.

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  • Collin Zeng

    Sure, almost 100% compatibility with XP and Vista applications. Just depends on how well the programs run inside a virtualized enviroment; I tried installing Windows XP as a guest OS in Windows 7 and performance was horrible, to say the least. Hey, I have a Q6600 with Intel VT enabled!

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  • http://www.tobbis-blog.de Tobbi

    Great feature!

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  • Indrek

    @Johnny Appleseed: I was referring to how every article about a new feature in Windows is flooded by Linux/Mac fanboys blabbering on about how their OS of choice has done something similar for years.
    Who cares? Let’s bury that axe already and just feel happy that computing as a whole is moving forward.

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  • http://info-tran.com/ Dave Lindhout

    All this so the corporate world can continue to run IE6. This could mean web developers will have to support IE6 for a long, long time. This will leave people happy or sad, depending on which side of the fence they are on.

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  • http://aurorafx.co.cc Haimin

    For the mac fanboys, shut the hell up. You’re all idiots.
    “Whats the point when I can use VMWare?”
    This feature is for corporations – Buisness, Enterprise, Ultimate. Enterprises won’t go out deploying VMs and purchasing ANOTHER license. This is free, I assume there will be a method to directly integrate in onto the Windows 7 install disk using WIM.

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  • Split

    @Splat

    VMs are sandboxed; whatever you do inside it, including virus infections, stays there. And the moment virtualized xp is turned off, those viruses are back to scratch, if not gone, so xp viruses are not exactly an issue. If you’re worried that an xp-compatible virus attached to a file may jump from the virtualized xp to windows 7, then you can have a good night sleep – virus simply wont work.

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  • Split

    @Me

    VMWare isn’t free. You have to purchase a separate license for that on top of the OS you will run on it. Yet it wouldn’t run as seamless as XPM does. This is an additional feature to Windows, so I don’t see why anyone would be “disappointed” having it there, let alone it’s for free. Only microsoft-hating fanboys do that. I bet you weren’t so much disappointed when Mac’s BootCamp was touted as a “compelling” Leopard feature, only to demonstrate what Parallels and VM Fusion have already been doing for so many years. Not worth the equally-fabricated hype either now, is it?

    @Kevin

    You probably need to go out a little ;)

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  • http://www.paq.ltd.uk Peter Cyriax

    How do applications running in the host and the VM communicate with eachother?

    Do they, for instance see teh other OS as a separte machine – something like \\XP and \\Win7.

    CVan you set up a virtual network, with a number of XP VMs running as if they were separate machines on a network

    Peter

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  • wanji

    I think the news here is not you’re going to be able to emulate XP software (that’s no news)… rather is that Microsoft is going to break with the past (i.e. Windows is evolving).
    I would never buy 7 to play XP software but I’m curious to see what they’re going to accomplish being free to cut outdated pieces of software.

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  • Split

    @Alan Hogan

    If you don’t want to be called a Macfag, then stop being one.

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  • briangw

    God, you people don’t get it. MS is releasing this software to be seamlessly used INSIDE Win 7, not an app such as VirtualBox or VPC. where you have to have an additional box open and then the app open inside of that. Let’s learn how to read, folks

  • http://aurorafx.co.cc Haimin

    @split good 1

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  • Ritesh Nair

    Hey i just added the 2003 iso inside the xpmode and am installing 2003. If it works i will see if i can add more vms that way. Just for fun.

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  • Takekaze

    Brilliant. Yeah, right. It’s like building a car that has two engines. One for regular fuel, one for diesel.

    Why not build it so that it’s compatible right away. Taking the car example again… why not build one engine for both fuels.

    MS at work. Lovely.

    And remember, it’s still not a gold version. MS might get the brilliant idea of canning it.

    I mean, just take this part: “Now, they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications.”

    Impossible.

    MS has tested this with ALL currently running Windows applications? All of them? a couple of hundred, thousand software applications?

    Yeah. Right. In their dreams. They’ve tested it with MS products. If you use non-MS you’ll get shafted. It’s MS after all.

    More and more I’m beginning to think to move 100% away from MS.

    And if it’s about who does it better, then MS is already crawling across the finisihng line last after Linux and after Apple.

    @Haimin, because so many companies update their Windows OS every time a new appears. Yes. Sure. You know what that would cost if they’d do it? They run with what they need, not with what is new.

  • Takekaze

    And honestly, personally I don’t see a reason to get Windows 7. It’s going to be the same like it was with Vista. I had absolutely no reason to get Vista. Directx 10? I’m not going to buy a new OS only for a new Directx. And that is be all there is. Vista isn’t any faster for my workflow than XP. Same will be for Vista.

    Applications?

    Not really an issue.

    So XP will be outdated? Boohoo! Doesn’t matter. Handsome is what handsome does, kids. As long as it gets the job done the way I want it, the way I need it, I’m fine with it.

    And at least XP doesn’t eat up resources like crazy. Any news on how much resources will be eaten up by 7 for no reason at all? Like in Vista? Ridiculous.

  • ctan

    > Why not build it so that it’s compatible right away. Taking the car example again… why not build one engine for both fuels.

    Wow, you must not be an engineer. Otherwise you’d realize that it’s impossible to build an engine that works efficiently for both fuel. It would be better to have two engines that work efficiently than one engine that doesn’t work at all.

  • ctan

    @Takekaze

    If you had read any of the above comments, you would see why this is a brilliant move. By doing this, they can start moving away from all of the outdated cruft necessary to maintain backwards compatibility (i.e. old, useless APIs). When everyone eventually releases software compatible with Windows 7, Microsoft can finally drop support for all of the useless code that it kept around for compatibility reasons.

    You might not realize it as a consumer, but this is pretty smart from a software engineering standpoint.

    Apple did the exact same thing when they switched from OS 9 to OS X. They emulated OS 9 in order to provide backwards compatibility as everyone slowly upgraded to OS X. Then when everyone migrated, they dropped support for OS 9. I’m not sure why you show support for Apple when you fail to see that Microsoft is doing the exact same thing.

    > I mean, just take this part: “Now, they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications.”
    > Impossible.

    Do you have any understanding for how a virtual machine works? I’m pretty sure you don’t. Otherwise you would immediately see why there is almost 100 percent compatibility. They’re running Windows XP within Windows 7. How the hell could you *not* get near 100 percent compatibility when you’re executing the target operating system itself?

    > MS has tested this with ALL currently running Windows applications? All of them? a couple of hundred, thousand software applications?
    > Yeah. Right. In their dreams. They’ve tested it with MS products. If you use non-MS you’ll get shafted. It’s MS after all.

    This just shows that you have no idea what a virtual machine is.

    > And at least XP doesn’t eat up resources like crazy. Any news on how much resources will be eaten up by 7 for no reason at all? Like in Vista? Ridiculous.

    You’re attacking Windows 7, but you don’t know the answers yourself? What grounds do you have for attacking Windows 7 then?

  • ctan

    > And remember, it’s still not a gold version. MS might get the brilliant idea of canning it.

    Furthermore, XP Mode is already out. Are they going to can something that’s mostly done and already downloadable from their website?

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  • carl

    “Microsoft has an history of “pushing” and “tying” features for free to their operating system to try to gain market share and customer acceptance after another company has already came up with the technology and is threatening their monopoly.”

    Well from what I can see here, Apple was never in a position to steal market share away from MS cause OSX wont run on my PC, they will never include support for 90% of the hardware out here. I run core i7, and windows 7.0RC works pretty well.and actually runs smoother and faster than vista. On my CPU, it scores 1.5 higher on CPU and RAM. Same hardware, different OS

    And if I remember rightly, I know a few mac people who have printers that now theyve bought a new intel mac. they cant get their old APPLE PRINTER to work natively, would only work in classic mode, which didnt work well.

    Shame on you MAC people for touting that OSX is better than windows. If mac was really better, would apple have decided to officially release a compatiubility laver to run XP or vista on an intel mac? Didnt think so. And when can I get my common off the shelf hardware to run OS 10.5? Never, would I even want to?

    And as for driver support, it depends on if the guest OS has access to the actual hardware. I am currently installing the VM and will see if it lets me install the XP driver for anything.

    And as for x86 and x64 support, you will be able to run x64 windows only with Hyper-V and a x64 HOST OS, any other way of running x64 wont work (at least well)

    XP mode will most likely be XP 32bit as there aren’t any xp64 apps that I know that don’t have vista/w7.0 support

    “Apple has done this at least twice before: Once when moving from System 7 to OS X (a COMPLETELY new core *and* UI) and once when switching processor designs (PPC to i386, meaning no binary could possibly run without virtualization).”

    Well actually when apple released OS X on Intel they had to recompile all binaries from ppc to i386, there are no PPC binaries that run on i386 macs. and as i mentioned earlier classic doesn’t run well on early OS X machines.

    what MS really wants to do, is to have a really small, but stable new base OS and not build all these compatibility feauters into the OS. This will go a long way towards keeping the OS secure. and to allow games and apps to run on their own with integration into the OS limited to avoid corruption and conflict

  • http://pureloveclub.net why sit now

    Why “upgrade” to windows 7 (vista SPx)? Virtual XP in Windows 7?

    XP itself can already address enough ram to fully function.

    Microsoft realizes the value of continuing to offer Windows XP…. here’s a thought… continue to support XP as an OS and not a VM

    sell the people what they’ll buy…. or lose CIO *homes* to OSX… and soon the office to *nix

    • Rdunna

      Why ? Because XP damages itself after some time. 

      W7 does the same ? I´ll find soon…

  • To All Normal People Out There

    I cannot believe the comments on this article – bare faced astroturfing of ‘news’ sites.

    “OMG THIS IS AMAZING NOW I CAN USE XP BUT PAY FOR VISTA 2!!11″

    Pathetic – the truth is probably far more sinister, windows 7 is still the XP with hacks upon hacks, still Vista fail, with more hacks to fix, so 7 is Vista 2, but now they’ve opened up the old shell for XP as a ‘new’ feature, they had a skip a version so people wouldn’t think they were paying three times for the same crap, worse each time.

  • shado

    i got a free copy from my school but it seems that i can’t get older hardware and drivers to install. maybe it’s just for programs after all.

  • Marc

    Oops, posted this under Pivot by mistake.

    Is it possible to run two or more instances of XP concurrently under Windows 7 Ultimate 64? That might help me get around the RAM limitations of XP.

    What would the implications be on performance? Possible “OS confusion?” Can I link the icons to specific instances?

    I do, of course, have licensed copies of XP to spare… may as well use them if I can.

    BTW, my Windows 7 box has 12 gb of RAM, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

    Marc

  • http://www.yahoo.com ttx

    the xp mode does not work at all i have the radeon 4650 1 gig video and 8 gig off memory and it does not work it is a lie again

  • windows 7 home with virtualbox and virtual pc 2007 running xp pro

    Ive got a hp compaq cq60 laptop with nvidia8200. I can run red alert2 yuris revenge on windows 7 but cant play lan games. as it uses ipx protcol. (xp still runs ipx)
    tried installing xp on laptop but no drivers for wifi , graphics etc available for xp, unless someone knows where i can get them from.
    Cant use westwood ipx to tcp patch as I run the game with no cd patch, ( I own the full game but use deamon tools iso of game in virtual cd drive – no carrying lots of cd’s.)
    due to the graphics card lack of drivers you can hear the game but can see it.
    Tried running game in compatability mode and even changing the resolution in the ra.ini files. no change
    loaded virtual xp on windows 7 and exactly the same happens.
    Even tried program 3D analyze but i may have settings wrong.
    are there drivers for virtual graphics card? or ipx to tcp programs for windows 7(ipx not natively supported on vista/7).
    I have also just tried to run c&c generals in virtual xp but comes up with dx error or not 3d compatable graphics card. I know my card works because it plays other 3d games on win 7.so any way of linking virtual vdu to win 7 drivers?
    if i upgraded to win7 pro would the virtual xp have the driver support for my widescreen nvidea?

    help!!!!!!!!!!1

  • http://90dayloans.blogspot.com/ Adam

    this is excellent information.I wonder how this secret got revealed.

  • http://www.aol.com ttx

    what a joke i have windows 7 pro and it sucks the games microsoft says run don’t the app’s they will run don’t and i have more then what it takes to run them in windows 7 microsoft says so now do you all know there is nsa software in vista and windows 7 (vista 2) and do you know they force you to take updates you don’t want and with out you knowing it they know that is on your computer with out you knowing it and when you install windows 7 or vista did you read the install no so now microsoft owns your computer. you give it to them when you install windows vista or windows 7 and no web cam or sound cards work right in windows 7 you will have to pay new hardware and software again hope you have the money you are going to need it and if microsoft comes out each year with a new windows god help us all and if they do then they need to drop the price to 49.95 or 59.95 plus taxs and when are they going to fix the windows 7 will you got it they are not

    • Abc

      Jesus dude, use some punctuation.