Windows 7 To Include "Windows XP Mode" 364
Z80xxc! writes "Paul Thurrott's WinSuperSite reports that Windows 7 will include a built-in virtual machine with a fully licensed copy of Windows XP Professional SP3. The VM runs in a modified version of Virtual PC, and applications running in the VM can interact directly with the host operating system as if they were running on the Windows 7 installation itself. While details are scarce for now, it looks as if this feature will only be available as a (free) addon for Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. Also, a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers. Microsoft confirmed the feature last night."
Had that for awhile now... (Score:5, Funny)
Altho I call it Kubuntu with XP running in QEMU....
Re:Had that for awhile now... (Score:5, Insightful)
XP! Pre configured, fully loaded with apps, fully patched, and pre hacked. Please seed!
Re:Had that for awhile now... (Score:5, Funny)
XP! Pre configured, fully loaded with rootkits, fully patched, and pre hacked. Please seed!
fixed that for you
Re:Had that for awhile now... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Had that for awhile now... (Score:5, Interesting)
What good is a rootkit in a VM? It'll be open just as long as the user needs to open some legacy app, won't have access to their file system, except what documents they choose to copy over temporarily and may or may not have internet access.
Running Windows in a VM is actually the ideal solution. Do all your net connected stuff via a secure OS like Linux, then open up a few ports for the VM to run games or whatever.
Not that safe (Score:4, Interesting)
root in virtual machine + bug in your CPU and/or bug in vm software = root in host machine.
Apparently there is an exploitable bug in intel processors. The "offsets" for the exploit might change depending on the motherboard you are using. So you better not be using a popular motherboard
that actually is a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the performance hit, the way to deal with that is simply to run a faster processor. Though even in virtualization, remember that XP was designed for processors a lot slower than anything you'll see in a modern computer.
M$ being willing to put virtualization in their OS gave
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Didn't we just have an article about a CPU hack which enables attacker to take over the whole system even from VM as long as the attacker gets root/admin access? I could be wrong though because the article went way over my head.
Re:Had that for awhile now... (Score:4, Interesting)
won't have access to their file system, except what documents they choose to copy over temporarily
Not true on any VM I've seen.
VirtualBox only gives the guest access to the virtual drive and to host directories that you manually configure as "shared", which then need to be "mapped" (i.e. you have to push "map network drive" under windoze and type the right thing.). Since the system sees these directories as servers (i.e. they are assigned their own drive letters), there is no way for the system to represent the notion of the parent directory of a "shared" host directory, or indeed to know that such a thing is applicable (read: .==..~=[D-Z]:\ for such directories as far as the guest is concerned), so how do you expect the virus/rootkit/what-have-you to get out of the box you've put it in?
Requested by the Military (Score:5, Interesting)
The U.S. Military is heavily invested in several applications that have been tested at Microsoft. (Military members do have offices in Redmond for this purpose.) Windows 7 was shown to have some issues. The USN scrapped plans to move to Vista, planned for this quarter, and decided to wait for Windows 7, but needed XP compatibility. The VM compromise was brewed up.
Re:Requested by the Military (Score:5, Informative)
I hope this causes them to upgrade their VirtualPC as it doesn't support USB devices currently.
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According to screenshots, XPM will support USB passthrough.
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Yes, but isn't this still just a marketing ploy - or an inability on Microsoft's part to figure out how to fully integrate VPC? WinXP emulation (WoW) in Vista and originally planned on Win7 was already based on VPC.
It (and killing VPC hosts on other OS's) was the core reason for the acquisition. This has been discussed numerous times here and elsewhere.
So now, to get the fully working XP emulation that had already been promised by using VPC for the basis of WoW (Windows on Windows - not the game), one has
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How is it a conspiracy? To me it sounds more like a company meeting the demands of a (big and important) customer.
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Miscorsoft has startd breaking backwards compatilibity in Win32 for the first time in the company's history. At least, I've seen this with Win2008, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar in Windows 7. So there is a chance of the same binary not working on WinXP and Windows 7.
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Now, if you use anything written by the *current* gang of retarded monkeys there, you're lucky to get 2 years before your code stops working (no .NET 1.1 on 64-bit, no .NET at all on 2008 core, etc, etc), but that's not Win32.
I'm pretty sure you can install .NET 1.1 on a 64-bit Windows. It's still 32-bit of course, but why would you need anything else for compatibility?
Core is very limited in many aspects, and I'd imagine that quite a few apps won't run on it even if they're native (e.g. if I remember correctly it doesn't include IE, so anything that tries to host it will die). On the other hand, .NET support is coming in 2008 R2 Core (mainly for the sake of ASP.NET, but also for PowerShell).
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Or more likely customers that think they've got an XP dependency.
Not just think, most of them actually do.
My company spent $10-20 million to test the feasability of moving to Vista from XP, and had to scrap it. Couldn't do it, and this was at a time when the company was raking in cash, it wasn't a money problem. It does become a problem, however, when you have to replace billions of dollars of infrastructure because the programs you have to use to tie in to do not work in Vista, then it becomes a money issue.
Especially when the only real percieved benefit is a snazzier
Re:Had that for awhile now... (Score:5, Interesting)
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You're right, of course.
What MS needed to do was to continue to make incremental improvements to XP. Maybe a facelift release (ala ME, but w/o as much cruft), and maybe an incremental security system release. I realize that's essentially what Vista is, but Vista broke entirely too many things to allow for it to be considered "maintaining the status quo".
All the while, they needed to be developing what is their 'next' OS in the background, with the VM plans for Win32 versions of their OS. The new version wou
I knew it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
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don't forget that you're installing Windows 7 inside VMWare, xVM or pick your favorite virtual machine software...
although I'd be willing to bet that the *feature* required "hardware vm support" isn't emulated inside the VMs...
I once knew someone who loaded linux, installed bochs, loaded windows inside bochs, installed bochs, loaded linux within bochs, within windows, within bochs, within linux..
after he got about 6 layers deep he stopped... his system was out of resources...
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't know Win7 was that broken...
Unbelievable, poor Microsoft.
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Have you forgotten that Apple did exactly that with Classic on OS X? Arguably with Rosetta as well.
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Classic wasn't precisely a VM in the normal sense, though, but rather more of an abstraction layer. Most PowerPC code was just run native and unchanged, and there was simply an abstraction layer that turned all the classic system calls (and some old hardware calls, admittedly) into modern equivalents.
The benefit of which was that you did not take nearly the performance hit you would for virtualizing the entire computer a'la a traditional VM, but the downside was that Classic would no longer work once Macs
Re:I knew it! (Score:4, Informative)
Carbon is the API abstraction layer; Classic was very much a VM - you even got to watch MacOS 9 boot in a window prior to any Classic application being loaded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_(Mac_OS_X)
Classic was only a VM and not an emulator, which is why the Intel chips are not supported.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't apple do this with OSX? You can run OS9 apps, but it is in a VM.
I'll see your "circa 2000" and raise you a 1987: Acorn, in the UK, switched from the 6502-based BBC Micro to the ARM-based Archimedes - they produced a "BBC Micro" emulator to run old software (usually much faster).
As well as Classic, Apple used a 68000 emulator to run legacy software when they switched to PowerPC and the "Rosetta" code translator to run PPC code when they went to Intel.
Thing is, though, these were all associated with fundamental, back-to-the-drawing-board changes to the platform - such as changing the CPU or switching to UNIX - which would otherwise have required all-new software from day one.
If MS had produced a completely new OS, free of the constraints of supporting existing software (or maybe gone .NET-only), then bundling an emulation or virtualization solution for legacy code would be essential.
Having a supposedly backwards-compatible OS which also requires a virtual copy of the old OS seems like the worst of both worlds.
Re:Time for MS to embrace UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
I should be surprised this got modded up, but it *is* on /.
Linux, as a kernel, does not AFAIK run significantly faster on equivalent hardware vs. NT. Some of the userspace certainly does, but some is also a lot slower - searches always take longer even though there's a lot less installed on my Linux partition (I keep it pretty clean), and without superfetch it feels that applications like WarCraft 3 (in Wine) or even Firefox take ages to start.
Viruses are a wild goose chase - they have existed since before Windows, and they will probably exist long after unless there's a drastic change in the fundamental capabilities of computers (i.e. mor ethan just an apprximate Turing machine). Security holes do still exist for *nix applicaitons and even kernels - for better or worse, I get more security patches per month on Linux than I ever do on Windows, although only occasionally are they at kernel or base library level - but even if malware authors can't xploit those, they'll fall back to the standard approach that has worked so well against Windows (itself a rather hard target these days) for the past few years: the user. There is absolutely nothing in *nix security that can protect against the dancing bunnies problem [codinghorror.com], especially if that user can get root access (although lots of damage can be done even without).
As for things you can do on Windows that you can't on Wine: well, try Exchange for starters. No other groupware solution has yet come close to the integration, feature set, and market deployment levels. Office 2007 is another; OO.o is an impressive project but they're still far behind in a number of areas (although Office 2008 does run on Mac, so that might not count). Then there are the games (wine is doing wonders here, but new stuff that doesn't work right is coming out all the time too), the Windows-only drivers (my modem *still* doesn't work in Linux, nor does the WiFi on one of my older laptops), and all the thousands of custom-written programs, only ever tested on their target machines, that businesses and other organizations have been creating for the last decade or so to run on Windows. Oh, you might also want to look at power management; with the proprietary nVidia driver (since the FOSS one is nowhere near ready yet), suspend-to-RAM in Linux quite simply does not work (on my current system, or the last two before it). This is, to put it mildly, a problem on a laptop.
Hardware virtualization, eh? (Score:2)
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New, yes. Old i disagree. There are *millions* of perfectly fine machines that don't have the extended instruction sets.
I have 2 under my desk at work, 2 ghz 2gb ram. Id not call that garbage. Neither have a newer chip.
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Wait a second (Score:5, Interesting)
if it will run XP mode software, wouldn't that mean XP style viruses now have a key right into the system?
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There's that possibility, but securing VMs can be fairly easy. Don't want internet connectivity? turn it off.
On the other hand, a virus that infected your XP VM wouldn't be able to infect the host OS unless it could complete the infection anyway. The only concern is that a VM being highly connected (to personal profiles and the like) may be granted permission to delete files, harvest information etc.
Microsoft wants to say Sup Dawg (Score:2, Funny)
We heard you like BSODing, so we put Windows in your Windows so you can crash while you crash.
This has been a long time coming (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't that essentially what Apple did with the transition from 68000 series chips to PowerPC, from OS 9.x to OS 10, and then again from Power PC to Intel?
I've believed this was a necessity for quite a while.
D
Back(ass)wards Compatibility. (Score:3, Interesting)
... one of the drawbacks of the WIndows platform - from an development and engineering point of view - is that it's backwards compatible all the way back to (if I'm not mistaken) Windows 1.0. That's an insane codebase to be dealing with. By bundling an XP VM with Win7, they can- for the first time - take the backwards compatibility crap out of Windows and concentrate on providing a stable OS. Isn't that essentially what Apple did with the transition from 68000 series chips to PowerPC, from OS 9.x to OS 10, and then again from Power PC to Intel? I've believed this was a necessity for quite a while. D
While I agree with your observation regarding making a "break" in the code by providing a virtualized "backwards-compatible" environment, what the hell is the reason the codebase IS compatible all the way to Windows 1.0?!?
When a company says "we're no longer going to support Windows 3x or Win9x, they should MEAN IT. NO support for the software. NO support for the hardware. This would be like me walking into the Ford dealership and demanding to know why they no longer "support" my 1978 F-150 for parts.
Ra
Re:Back(ass)wards Compatibility. (Score:5, Insightful)
When a company says "we're no longer going to support Windows 3x or Win9x, they should MEAN IT. NO support for the software.
They'd have to be insane to do that. Only an insane OS vendor would get incompatible with the largest collection of software in the history of computing.
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When a company says "we're no longer going to support Windows 3x or Win9x, they should MEAN IT. NO support for the software.
They'd have to be insane to do that. Only an insane OS vendor would get incompatible with the largest collection of software in the history of computing.
Uh, just because AOL managed to press entire landfills of compact discs doesn't mean they're suddenly in the "top 10" of relevant software, nor does it mean that AOL should give a rats ass about the last 7 versions back of their software.
When the hell was the last time you actually USED a Win3x or Win9x app? When was the last time Microsoft officially supported them? THAT is my point.
And I guess Apple was quite "insane" when they broke off between v9 and OSX too, right?
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They're just maintaining the Win32 API, which is easy and it does not decrease the quality of the new systems in any way. Most of the other parts of the 9x systems (such as the driver model) have been made incompatible for home users as soon as Windows XP was released. As for MS-DOS applications, I know quite a lot of businesses that still use software that someone wrote for them back in the early 90's. Believe me, you basically don't know what you're talking about.
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Because Microsoft's customer base would have said "Screw you, we have millions of dollars invested in custom Win32 software and we'll be running XP forever then".
This is not like the Mac world where there are a two big ISVs and a handful of smaller ones, and almost no custom/vertical applications.
Not to mention that the most important "XP-only" application isn't even third party. It is Internet Explorer 6.0.
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Actually, I can walk into a Jeep dealer and get parts for my 1983 Jeep Scrambler. Sometimes they're in stock and sometimes they have to order them. No that I do very often, mind you. Dealers charge 3 to 10 times more than an independent parts store. Only when I wanted the actual OEM gasoline filler hose, pre-bent in some god-forsaken unique shape, did I actually go to a dealer. But in stock it was.
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The main reason Windows has such massive market share is the backward compatibility.
It's because BUSINESSES rely on it, and Business is where Windows pounds most other OS's in use. Of all my friends, well over half use Macs (50+% market penetration), yet over-all, Windows has 90% market share (give or take). That delta is all about business.
And most businesses are very slow to upgrade, and have custom apps that cannot be easily rewritten. It's EXPENSIVE to rewrite something for a new OS just because the
Re:This has been a long time coming (Score:4, Informative)
they can- for the first time - take the backwards compatibility crap out of Windows and concentrate on providing a stable OS.
No, they can't. The vast majority of Windows 7 users will be running one of the Home editions, which aren't going to have this "Virtual XP" mode. RTFA or just the summary.
Re:This has been a long time coming (Score:4, Informative)
The CPU transitions were handled at a much lower-level - the CPU was emulated, but not the OS, so even emulated software was running in the native OS. Apart from the performance drop, running apps in Rosetta (the PPC emulator) is pretty seamless; you can try it out by choosing an app, File->Get Info, then checking the 'Open in Rosetta' checkbox.
But yeah, the OS9->OSX transition did something similar to what Microsoft's describing. I only hope that Microsoft manage it a bit more gracefully than Apple did, 'cos that had serious usability problems and was a pretty jarring experience overall.
Re:This has been a long time coming (Score:5, Insightful)
My fear is that once they have provided for running legacy software in a VM, they will feel free to move on towards their ultimate goal - an OS that will no longer run native code. They will come out with an OS that only runs .NET managed code, and thereby exercise total control over what you can ultimately run on the platform. It will be a form of "Trusted Computing" [wikipedia.org] in disguise. Only specially certified "Microsoft Partners" will be allowed special access to develop the libraries underlying .NET, and the rest of us will be shut out. Microsoft will excercise absolute control over what can be run on their OS and thereby gain enormous powers far beyond what they have today.
Re:This has been a long time coming (Score:4, Insightful)
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They will come out with an OS that only runs .NET managed code, and thereby exercise total control over what you can ultimately run on the platform.
I do not see at all how one follows from the other. For example, it is fairly obvious that one doesn't need any form of managed code to exercise total control over what can ultimately run on the platform - you can sandbox native code just as well (and you can jailbreak CLR managed code just as easily), except when the OS uses a TPM chip to validate signatures for all code, in which case it doesn't matter either way.
On a side note, in case you haven't noticed, after several years of ".NET .NET .NET!" there h
is it a sandbox or not? (Score:3, Insightful)
if it can interact just like it was on windows7, will it be just as vulnerable?
will people choose to use that rather than windows 7 all the time?
will it run on top of a hypervisor? ie, can it access the hardware directly?
Will solve a lot of legacy problems (Score:5, Insightful)
And thanks to the USB support, I can also use:
1) Very old USB scanner with XP 32-bit drivers. I use it a few times a year for digitalizing reciepts etc., and I really don't want to pay for a new one.
2) Random gadgets with stupid software and buggy drivers.
Getting this free with Windows 7 would really rock.
Won't solve a whole lot (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, while this is a long overdue solution that other companies have used fine before, but it's going to prove problematic for Microsoft. Things that won't work (and Joe User will try to do anyway):
1.) Install their XP-compatible Antivirus program. "It said on the Windows 7 box that I could run old programs!"
2.) Install a printer which works on XP only. "The printer box said it works on Windows. Why can I only print from some programs (the older ones seem to work)?"
3.) Play an old game at reasonable speed. "I installed Super Hardware Killer Shooter for Windows XP and the 3D is running really slow!"
Virtualization is a great thing. I use it work all the time and love it. The public doesn't quite "get it" yet. They're going to see some things work, some things not and wonder why the hell that is. It happened when Apple moved to OS X, but the user base was much smaller so the complaints were less.
Until someone creates a hypervisor which is presented in a completely transparent way to the OS, in that things difficult to virtualize (e.g. video card hardware) run at normal speeds, it's just going to appear to the user "every time I run an old program, either it's too slow or it doesn't work".
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Most people won't have Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Those that do probably know what they are doing or are at work where they are constricted in what they can install anyway.
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But it fixes the PERCEIVED problem that Vista is incompatible with lots of legacy software. Microsoft can point at Windows 7 and say that it runs MORE than Vista, and actually be truthful about it.
Yes, it's all semantics at the end of the day. In truth I've been running 64-bit Vista on my work laptop for months now and I actually really like it. Although I still deal with the occasional incompatibility, it's usually nothing I can't work around. It's far more stable than XP, and I feel a lot more secure (yes
Cut Out The Middle Man (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they could cut out the virtual machine and offer Windows XP SP3 as a separate product? It would eliminate all of the virtual machine overhead.
This move to bundle this with Virtual Server seems analogous to the bundling of Internet Explorer in Windows 98. I wonder if Microsoft is trying to kill VMWare and Parallel's market share like they killed Netscape's browser share.
Finally, it is pretty sad when your operating system requires a virtual machine to emulate what the operating system should do nativel
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Finally, it is pretty sad when your operating system requires a virtual machine to emulate what the operating system should do natively.
I call FUD. If you want to run some old-ass linux executables you'll probably need an old-ass Linux to run them on, and while you COULD integrate all that stuff into your current install by sticking everything in different paths and tweaking LD_PRELOAD constantly, it might STILL cause problems. Meanwhile, Windows NT has always used a virtual machine process to run 16 bit executables.
OTOH, including "all" of Windows XP SP3 seems kind of egregious...
I get to buy windows twice? (Score:2, Insightful)
So let me get this straight. I can buy windows 7 and not have to worry about it sucking more than XP because I can run XP in virtualization. So if I go back to XP I just paid for the privilege of running XP twice? Microsoft has really gone downhill lately. The upgrades seem to have negative marginal value these days. Who would have paid for the privilege to run Windows 3.1 in Windows 95? Where's the innovation? It seems like each release they just take features away and only give them back to you if
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Once people's knees stop jerking, they might actually realize they like Windows 7. What they hate is change, or any kind.
Not dead yet! (Score:5, Interesting)
So does this mean M$ will be extending the fully supported period for XP again, as it will be shipping with W7?
Min
All features are vaporware until released IMO (Score:4, Funny)
By "confirmed the feature last night", did you mean:
"confirmed their intention to include an interesting feature, which in all likelihood will be dropped in the last quarter before release because other issues critical to the fundamental infrastructure of the OS have been discovered and will require 110% of effort in order to result in an acceptable basic release?"
I've been trying to learn Spanish lately - my corpspeak is seeming pretty fluent.
Thumbs up! (Score:5, Insightful)
XP comes home (Score:2)
Now we know what this Win7 is meant for.
Will it include P2V? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a desperation measure aimed at IT guys (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that while this will solve some of the IT guys' problems (legacy apps, desktops, maybe security model) it will not solve what is probably the most important problem to some of them, deployment and drive reimaging. Also depending on how easy it is to break out of the emulation sandbox, they may not be happy with the security model either. When you are talking about pretty much rebuilding a network with 100,000 machines, paying an extra couple of hundred in blackmail per box for MS to let you keep using what you know works makes a lot more sense than jumping off into the void. MS may overcome some of the corporate reluctance with this ploy, particularly at smaller companies, but I don't think it's going to crack the egg they need to crack.
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First, I have to say something about the end of the summary:
a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers
Nearly every single Intel CPU made in the last several years includes their VT technology built in. All new i7 chips include it. I have no idea why someone would think the embedded VM is restricted to "power users". By the time Win7 is released, almost every computer running it will h
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Processors with hardware virtualization (Score:2)
Like in that Dilbert cartoon... (Score:2)
It's just like in that Dilbert cartoon where they find out the best marketing strategy for their new music-player is to sell it a bit cheaper than the iPod, bundle it with the iPod and provide free access to a landfill.
Well anyhow, it's Microsoft's only choice. They won't be able to sell their newer OSes because they are not compatible. The _only_ reason why people ever bought Microsoft's product was backwards compatibility.
Apple called from the year 2000 (Score:5, Informative)
Apple called from the year 2000 and wants their legacy transition strategy back... but hey it did work, so I say go for it Microsoft.
BTW virtualization need not be in a window. When Apple provided OS 9 aka "Classic" support they didn't make the apps second class citizens in any way relevant to getting work done. Sure they were running in emulated mode and were not as fast as they could be but they had access to all peripherals, etc.
Modern virtualization allows for way better performance, full access to all hardware and as importantly can still be sandboxed.
They should hide all the virtualization aspects though and just let the apps open like they are regular apps with maybe a title bar note saying "(Windows XP) or something so there is a clue when an app gets updated to full native capabilities (the note will go away.
When Mac OS did this transition it was actually quite exciting (though also frustrating) as I would be on the look-out for the OSX native version of some software to come out.... then we got to do it again when the Intel binaries came out...
Anyways, if Microsoft does it right it will be transparent and will allow them to finally do away with the legacy support roadmap. This XP virtual mode will be there as long as it takes for companies to move their apps over to 64 bit Windows 7/8 whatever compatibility.
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"Apple called from the year 2000 and wants their legacy transition strategy back"
IBM called from 1992 with OS/2 2.x onwards. ;)
What about win 9x or even dos vm in windows 7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Education users would KILL for a Win9X VM in
windows 7. A lot of educational applications had to be "retired" because XP wouldnt run them in a secure mode. Educators use good programs until they dont run anymore a lot of programs from 10-15 years ago children in K-2 classrooms still enjoy but wont run on XP.
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cbhacking, If your going to mock someone please properly read what they are saying.
Of course Win 9x didnt have a secure mode, Win XP professional had a more secure mode where it could be locked down at the registry level to prevent users modifying folders.
Many win 9x programs cant be run in XP because of that, now if Win 7 created a Win 9x sandbox mode(including dos and hardware emulation) that would be a crucial and desirable feature for K-12 education.
CARDFILE.EXE (Score:3, Funny)
Sometimes you want a program to just do one simple thing well. CARDFILE is one of those programs. Now it looks like it ought to run under the right -- read expensive -- version(s) of W7.
If there's a better replacement, feel free to point it out to me and I'll appreciate it.
Re:Also has a "Vista Mode" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And who needs it most? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that it's you who is missing the boat. This is a very good move on MS' part for companies that have custom apps that are known to run properly on XP. Rather than having to go through extensive testing to ensure they run properly on Windows 7, they can instead be run in this VM. It's a move to make companies feel more at-ease in their transitions to Windows 7.
Re:And who needs it most? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet who is more likely to have old applications or hardware that will need XP? If you have the latest and greatest full bells and whistles OS, you probably have the latest version of your apps as well. Once again, MS misses the boat.
It seems that it's you who is missing the boat. This is a very good move on MS' part for companies that have custom apps that are known to run properly on XP. Rather than having to go through extensive testing to ensure they run properly on Windows 7, they can instead be run in this VM. It's a move to make companies feel more at-ease in their transitions to Windows 7.
Except that this is pure PHB-bait -- IT professionals are going to realize pretty quick that all their apps are going to require testing to ensure they can be run in this VM, just like if they were being tested for Windows 7.
The only ones who are going to go "hey, neat, free XP" are the C?Os that don't quite understand technology anymore and the consumers who don't really need this feature, anyway.
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I have a laptop that I bought a year ago that came preinstalled with Vista. XP wouldn't install on it (I'm sure there is some hack, but I don't have the time or energy to find it). When this laptop running this crummy OS is up for recycling, I'd be very happy to know that the next one I buy can run in XP mode and all of my software will run nicely.
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Re:And who needs it most? (Score:5, Informative)
I think companies are more likely to depend on old software that runs only on XP. So they target the correct users indeed.
Most non-corporate users only use programs to browse the tubes, print documents, send email and view photo's, nothing that depends on XP :)
Re:And who needs it most? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think companies are more likely to depend on old software that runs only on XP. So they target the correct users indeed.
Most non-corporate users only use programs to browse the tubes, print documents, send email and view photo's, nothing that depends on XP :)
Do not forget gamers/power users. I loathe the fact that I need a killer machine, to run a killer OS, to run Call of duty about at the same Frame per second rate as my old machine, with a few bells and whistles involved that I do not care particularly about.I'd end up paying 1.000 bucks on hardware, 250 on OS, and 50 on the game just to stay where I am now.
One other consideration is that these strategy of enabling XPsp3 in windows 7 will surely put some noses out of joint, plus leaving the door open for interesting legal questions. Imagine this scenario: in an all win XP sp3 outfit, the company buys half a dozen copies of win7. are these particular associated copies of XP officially supported while all the legacy copies aren't?
Remember: if a company has a particular, mission critical application that runs in XP, and this application is "good enough/fast enough" as is, the requirement of the company is "cheap xp machines with xp installed", NOT "rich win 7 machines with win7 plus a virtual machine with XP", if only because cost of hardware goes up. Given the low price of entry level hardware these days, the OS is representing a bigger slice of the pie than previously, so pressure there is higher. I would not be surprised if somebody did a "spoiling attack" claiming that all this design is a win7 tax and demanding to be able to buy legitimate XP copies....at old win xp prices.
Re:And who needs it most? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose MS's reasoning is, that all computers in a company should have windows 7 and use this compatibility feature to run XP only programs, instead of having some real windows XP computers, adding this feature helps remove an excuse for not installing Win 7 (in the eyes of Microsoft, not my own opinion).
I still don't see the reason for the complaint though, I mean, what do you want them to do? NOT include this feature? Make the feature work on crappy computers? In the future all CPU's will have hardware virtualization anyway, we're talking about a future OS on future computers here, non power users of the near future will have a CPU that is more powerful than a CPU of today and with hardware virtualization.
And also, don't power users use "Professional" versions of Windows anyway, instead of "Home" versions? The "Home" versions are the versions for the users that just browse internet and put photo's on their HD (and then losing them because they don't back them up and don't put them on a separate partition of their disk and will let someone format their HD to install a new windows after a virus infection anyway).
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In the future all CPU's will have hardware virtualization anyway, we're talking about a future OS on future computers here, non power users of the near future will have a CPU that is more powerful than a CPU of today and with hardware virtualization.
As far as I know everything including and after the AMD Athlon X2 and Intel Core 2 processors support that already. They're certainly fast enough too.
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Re:And who needs it most? (Score:4, Interesting)
Rubbish, my PC (built for the equivalent of about $500 (over 2 years ago - granted I upgraded the GPU last year but that would have only added another $100 after replacing the old one) and it runs Vista perfectly fine including all the latest games.
This whole thing about having to spend a fortune on hardware for vista is BS. You do NOT need to a 'killer' machine to run a 'killer' OS as you so put it.
Granted it took a while for the graphics drivers for games to mature properly to the point of being similar to XP, but that happened a while ago, and on any modern (and not necessarily expensive PC), the performance difference will be minimal between Vista/7 and XP.
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You don't need Vista Ultimate to play video games, do you?
Home Premium is only $140 where I buy my hardware (in Canadian Currency) as far as I know it should be able to play games just as well as Ultimate.
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Yet who is more likely to have old applications or hardware that will need XP? If you have the latest and greatest full bells and whistles OS, you probably have the latest version of your apps as well. Once again, MS misses the boat.
I, for one don't want to get rid of quality games like Baldur's Gate 2.
Also, if they build in a VM like that, they could use it to let that handle compatibility and turn the OS itself upside down, getting rid of all the cruft that's been accumulating since win95 in some cases. Just like Apple did with OSX. It worked beautifully. Of course, being MS, they fucked up again, introducing this when they're almost done. It should have been in the design.
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Oh, and another thing: if they can integrate Linux like that as well, they could get people to migrate back. Hell, I'd give it a spin. Especially if they can enable 3D acceleration for Linux properly. And Total Commander. The possibilities are limitless.
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Amusingly, BG2 works perfectly in the 7 beta. I even have it running with Baldur's Gate Trilogy without any problems. I agree that 7's compatibility with anything non-vista is horribly awful, but BG2 thankfully works.
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For those who don't know: BG Trilogy [shsforums.net] is a method of importing the original BG assets into BG2.
It's possible to do that and add a boatload of other mods (like Dark side of the Sword Coast) to create an epic, continuous game that goes from the escape from Candlekeep all the way through to the Throne of Bhall.
Re:And who needs it most? (Score:5, Insightful)
-1 Clueless
Do you honestly believe that it's to cater for the needs of home users that XP is still around?
Home users aren't the ones causing Microsoft to worry about the adoption of Windows 7. Most home users don't even pay much attention to the operating system. They'll use whatever comes with the Dell they got, as long as it allows them to surf the web, write the occasional document in Word and load music to their iPod - things that work well on Vista.
Enterprises however, who hold several million worth of internally developed business critical software - code that relies on all the cracks and crooked ends of XP; these are the ones causing sleepless nights at Redmond.
Not only that (Score:3, Insightful)
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No. Not in any way.
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New and improved with full backwards compatibility leaves the errors of the past in the operating system, and hence can never be removed. By adding an emulation mode they're ensuring backwards compatibility, yet making it that bit more awkward forcing new software writers to conform to their newer operating system yet not breaking everything.
Sometimes it's hard to get rid of your old mistakes because people end up relying upon them. By adding pressure in the sense of annoyance forces design changes without
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I'm talking universal binaries in this case, not the 9 to 10 change.
But even that was a radical shift, so it was either that or cut off the existing software base, far different then windows XP to 7 which is basically the same.
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Apple ran 9 and 10 together for a period of time as well, plus they released the Carbon API back to OS 9 as well as having it available to 10. They killed a whole heap of API's from 9, kept some that they're only just getting around to killing and then created a new one which they ported back to 9 so that you could get over the gap even easier.
Apple have changed architecture twice in their lifetime AFAIK and have done a great job of maintaining things.
9 to 10 had its own emulation stuff, the "Classic" layer
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First, my comment about how fast Win 7 is on older hardware is NOT from MS, but from people who have installed the Win 7 beta on 3-5 year old LAPTOPS and been amazed at how fast it was.
Second, I HAVE run Linux in a VM on XP and that was on a crappy 1.5 GHz processor with only half a gig of ram 7 years ago. Surprisingly, it actually didn't run all that slow. It definitely wasn't the fastest, but again -- half a gig of ram, so after I gave Linux 256 MB to run on, I only had the minimum specs for ram on XP