. Essentially XP Mode provides Windows XP in a virtual environment into Windows 7 allowing you to run many of your favourite Windows XP applications. It seems like a good idea – rather than trying to make Windows 7 backward compatible with all manner of software products – simply provide Windows XP in its own environment. This also allows much freeing up of developers time to make further enhancements and refinements to Windows 7 – ready for its release.
As I am running Windows 7 in a virtual environment on my XP machine it will prove an even more interesting challenge and experiment to then run XP in a virtual environment on my virtual Windows 7 set up. I downloaded the 445 MB file onto Windows 7 then started the application installation process. The installation started pretty swiftly, created a virtual hard disk file for virtual Windows XP, registered the product and showed me where to find the created disk file.
What now I thought? There was no trace of it in the Start menu and double-clicking the created .vhd file did little to help.
Presumably we need to install a virtual manager, such as Windows Virtual PC Beta fromwww.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc a download of just under 5MB. Before installing Virtual PC Beta you need to ensure virtualisation is enabled in your BIOS.
After activating virtualisation technology on my laptop and local Virtual PC I set about attempting the install – the first warning returned was “Windows Update Standalone Installer – The update is not applicable to your computer.”
The first step was to run winver from the Start menu to find out the current version of Windows 7 which is reported as Microsoft Windows Version 6.1 (Build 7000). It was at this point the realisation struck me – I must still be running Windows 7 Beta even though I had already downloaded Windows 7 RC. Forty minutes later and I have a build of Windows 7 RC installed reporting Microsoft Windows 6.1 (Build 7100) and Virtual PC Beta installs just fine.
Post installation a new group appears under the Start Menu called Windows Virtual PC, under this a Virtual Windows XP is available.
I now have a Virtual Windows XP under Windows 7. Once I have given it a good run I will write a little more about it.
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