A Mixed Review For Windows 7's XP Mode

The Register writes "If one thing excited people more than the disclosure of the Windows 7 Release Candidate's availability, it was the news of Windows 7 XP Mode. The Reg's Tim Anderson gave Windows XP Mode a mixed report in his review of the Windows 7/Virtual PC combo. Overall, the level of integration is excellent and Windows XP Mode showed strong potential. However, responsiveness of applications was sluggish and the seamless integration between Windows 7 and XP proved confusing."

What I find disturbing...

[palegray.net]

I find it disturbing that people could become become acclimated enough to Vista's horrendous interface that XP is somehow confusing.

I wish I could run Ubuntu 9.04 in 8.10 mode.

[yourassOA]

Then I could watch YouTube in fullscreen. Maybe this could be a way of solving legacy code problems. Why make a new OS backward compatible when you can completely scrap old code. Use a virtual OS for backward compatibility.

Re:What's missing?

[commlinx]

Did they really change enough to warrant something like this? What is Win7 lacking that prevents older applications from running?

When I moved to Vista x64 I created a few VMWare XP virtual machines and it did ease the pain of having a handful of applications that wouldn't run under Vista. It's probably not aimed so much at mainstream applications that will have any Windows 7 incompatibilities patched quickly, more at a few legacy niche applications that may otherwise prevent an enterprise from moving to Windows 7.

As another example I have a few USB device programmers and other electronics gear that are end of life so don't have Vista USB drivers, however they would have been expensive to replace so there's no way I would have moved to Vista without being able to use them under a VM.

Re:I must not understand what they're trying to do

[BobPaul]

Did you even read the article?

Microsoft = Awkward & Confusing Integration

[uberzip]

I actually tend to like Windows and other Microsoft products but for some reason whenever they have to make a change for security or try to integrate something new, they seem to do so in a completely confusing way. For instance, could the extra security on IE 6&7 for allowing active x controls be any worse? What about the macro warning on basically any useful Access DB? It wouldn't surprise me if the XP compatibility feature in Win 7 is indeed a confusing mess. My theory is that they design this stuff by committee rather than having one smart person architect the stupid stuff. Thus, interface and process design gets convoluted and confusing. Ok, so this is all still in beta but it often surprises me why a lot of this stuff gets to public beta before people notice the confusion. I think the UAC was a good example of this... it should have never got out the door in its initial state.

Wine on Win7?

[skiminki]

I was just thinking that occasionally Linux runs Windows applications better than Windows. So, could I use Wine on Windows 7 and forget all about that VM hassle and sluggishness?

Word I Heard

[Nom du Keyboard]

Word I heard is that because PCs can't virtualize devices that an XP VM under W7 will run like crap - although on AMD processors it will be a little less like crap due to better memory virtualization than Intel yet has.

Licensing problems with XP?

[hoarier]

So skip it and go straight to Win2k. No "authentication" nonsense with that.

OS/2 for NT, round two.

[os2fan]

I think it's another re-run of OS/2 1,x PM virtualisation under NT 4. When you install this package, the program launcher still lives in the host system, and any commands to start an application visits the host, and then switches to the virtualisation.

Compare OS/2's virtualisation of Windows 3.x. OS/2 still launches the app, but it does not do a graphic repaint of the current host screen to do this.

Re:This does not go far enough... see apple

[Kaboom13]

So MS should do a total rewrite of Windows? Oh yeah, theres no chance that would turn into a massive boondoggle, the software development version of a giant pit you shovel money into and never get anything out of.

While I agree theres definitely a ton of legacy crap to be thrown out, it works. While I'm sure the programmers will be happy, a total rewrite means throwing away a decade of lessons learned the hard way.

Apple had a lot of advantages in their situation that MS does not. For one thing, they controlled all the hardware. This meant no massive effort to get drivers made for an os that is still years away.
The mac development community was much smaller, tighter knit, and connected with Apple then Window's has ever been. They supported it because Mac OS X would bring a lot of things missing in 9 that caused them a ton of headaches. There was very little in the way of custom in-house apps written for Mac, because there was very little corporate mac use period.

Finally, and perhaps the biggest, was the fact that for most users, their experience with the new OS would be on new hardware, at a time when hardware was improving at break neck speeds. There is a much bigger difference to the end user between a 200 mhz processor and a 400 mhz processor then a 2 ghz and 4 ghz.

The PC world and the Mac world are different. Apple firmly leads the Mac world. Microsoft is the big dog of the pc world but as Vista has shown, it has limits. Backwards compatibility is one of their biggest selling points. Windows works, its not alway pretty, but it works. Tossing out something that works to start over is the quick path to having nothing at all.

mixed opinion of the reviewer's intelligence

[Bill Dog]

He has a 3 GB RAM machine, and left the VM size at 256 MB. I was getting sluggishness at work with XP installed in 512 MB VMware VM's. Even minimalist and cheapo netbooks come with 1 GB minimum, to properly run XP (and Home edition, at that). Try installing XP (SP3) and Word on an actual PC with only 256 MB of RAM, and then load them up and I'll bet it's sluggish as well.

VirtualBox

[toby]

Several Vista users I know hate it so much they asked me to install VirtualBox [virtualbox.org] running XP - after they saw it running on my wife's Mac. (She only uses it because some sites use browser plugins not available for OS X - another effect of the monopoly).