TechCast Reviews

25th August 2009

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What is Windows XP Mode?
Windows XP Mode is a feature that has been designed to run on certain versions of Windows 7. This feature allows you to run Windows XP in a virtualised environment, allowing you to run older or incompatible applications on Windows 7.

Setup
Windows XP mode is available to owners of Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate versions. If you’re running the latest Release Candidate or the Release to Manufacture versions, then you’ll be eligible to download the two components that are required to virtualise Windows XP.

Before you get started, you’ll need to check whether your hardware is capable of running Windows XP Mode:

“Windows Virtual PC requires a CPU with the Intel® Virtualization Technology or AMD-V™ feature turned on. This feature must be enabled in the system BIOS. For details on how to enable, visit the Configure BIOS page* or check with your computer manufacturer.”

*http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/configure-bios.aspx

You can find the files you will need to get Windows XP Mode to work here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

Once you’ve checked that you got the right hardware, if you’re on a PC, you also need to make sure that hardware virtualisation is enabled in your BIOS.

Windows Virtual PC comes in at 6MB and the virtualised XP file weighs in at 472MB. If you ever went through the experience of installing Windows XP from the original setup disc, you’ll remember that it took the best part of an hour before you could do anything. Thankfully, those days are gone, as XP Mode only takes about 15 minutes from installation to seeing that classic blue taskbar. You also won’t have to go through the chore of installing any Service Packs as Service Pack 3 has already been slipstreamed into the installation. No activation is required and you’re not prompted for any installation keys as you would with a normal install of XP.

Performance
Despite being virtualised on top of another OS, you’ll hardly notice any slow-down in responsiveness. It feels and responds as though this were a native OS, and I guess that is in part down to some clever Hyper-V variation of Microsoft’s virtualisation technology combined with full hardware utilisation of virtualisation technology that has been present on consumer-end CPU’s for some time now.

By default, Virtual PC allocates 512MB of RAM to your XP installation – if you want more you can adjusted. Virtual Machine settings can be configured from the settings panel but you do need to shut the Virtual Machine down fully. This has to be done from the Ctrl + Alt + Delete dialog box as opposed to just closing the window, which will only hibernate the virtual machine.

Features
If you’re familiar with virtualisation from using other systems such as Parallels or VMWare on Mac OS X, you’ll find some of the Virtual PC features work in a similar way. This includes USB device-sharing, Clipboard sharing and local virtual networking for easy file transfers between two different operating system environments. Another handy feature is what I call modality mode. It lets you run Windows XP programmes without having the desktop environment loaded. You can activate this feature for any application simply by viewing the Properties from the right click menu and selecting Windows XP (Service Pack 3) from the Compatibility tab.

For web developers on the Windows platform, I can see this being an invaluable tool for debugging websites in Internet Explorer 6 as this is the default bundled browser for Windows XP. You can now seamlessly switch between Internet Explorer 6 and 8 when writing your CSS files or testing your web applications.

Virtual PC will let you install and manage multiple Virtual Machines, so if you also want to virtualise Windows Vista, you can perform your own installation.

What does this mean for the future of Windows?
The approach that Microsoft has taken with backwards compatibility means that legacy support for older applications no longer needs to be a priority for future versions of Windows. Windows XP Mode also represents a workable solution to get businesses running on ancient systems to finally make the move with the peace of mind that applications that have known compatibility problems with Vista and 7 will work.

How does it affect the average user?
Whilst Windows XP Mode is quite an important feature, it’s only available to those with the Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Since the release of Vista, most modern applications now work on the Windows Vista and Windows 7 platforms, negating the need for something as extreme as a virtual machine.