“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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.