[ale] OT "1 step forward, 2 steps back"

[Michael Trausch]

On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 15:55 -0400, Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> I use Win 7 at work and have an install at home as well, the VM thingy
> only works so so.  Even less so for games and multimedia apps.  There 
> are quite a few bits of software that doesn't work under Win7 even in 
> compat. mode.  Again mostly games and multimedia apps.  Also 7        
>  explicitly prevents 16 bit apps from running.  I would recommend 
>  anyone who HAS to have full winxp compatibility to use vmware player.
>    The hard drives are changing the way they are formatted and report 
>  head/cylinder/etc information and microsoft has no intention on 
>  fixing  XP, but there are quite a few workarounds for it.

I've used the XP Mode for running software that won't run on Win7 with a
complete success so far.  I know some people that (still!) use software
from the days of Windows 3.1, which of course was 16-bit.  Such software
will not run in 64-bit Windows 7.  However, it *will* run under the
32-bit Windows XP that runs inside of the bundled Virtual PC, which
works just as good as any other full-system emulator I have used.  It
does feel slower than KVM for doing the same things on the same system,
but I haven't actually measured that, so I could just be full of it.  I
don't know.

I would not expect graphically intensive games to work anywhere close to
ideally.  However, Windows XP Mode really wasn't intended for that; no
full-system emulation (even with hardware assist) is going to be able to
do all of that and a bag of chips, because there is too much between the
hardware and the virtualized operating system.

	--- Mike

-- 
Even if their crude and anticompetitive business practices don't make
you think about using their software, their use of sweatshops and child
labor should:  boycott Microsoft like you would any other amoral child
abuser:  http://is.gd/btW8m

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