Confused about W7 Pro in XP mode
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
A friend went back to the USA for the summer and offered to pick me up a cheap copy of W7 while he was there. This has opened a rather huge can of M$ worms as they have definitely regionalized their OS.
I have W7 Starter on my Toshiba and Chinese Vista on my 64bit Quad. I was thinking of migrating the Chinese Vista to W7 Pro in English for a somewhat stable Windows OS for the foreseeable future.
Why did I decide on Windows 7 Pro rather than Home Premium? It offers XP mode and without much thinking I thought this would be a MUST HAVE for legacy Parallax IDEs and other similar stuff.
And yet, I have all those legacy applications already installed and (I thought) ready to run in W7 Starter.
Does anyone have any clarity of what M$ is really up to with the XP mode feature?
As it is, to get English Windows7 Pro in Taiwan, I have to pay 150% of what people in the USA pay for it AND it is subject to Export Restrictions that the USA have long imposed on Windows in regards to encryption technologies. It is a real mine field out there if one tries to buy a copy from someone besides M$, so I am rather stuck at spending much money or just limping along with Vista and W7 Starter.
I have W7 Starter on my Toshiba and Chinese Vista on my 64bit Quad. I was thinking of migrating the Chinese Vista to W7 Pro in English for a somewhat stable Windows OS for the foreseeable future.
Why did I decide on Windows 7 Pro rather than Home Premium? It offers XP mode and without much thinking I thought this would be a MUST HAVE for legacy Parallax IDEs and other similar stuff.
And yet, I have all those legacy applications already installed and (I thought) ready to run in W7 Starter.
Does anyone have any clarity of what M$ is really up to with the XP mode feature?
As it is, to get English Windows7 Pro in Taiwan, I have to pay 150% of what people in the USA pay for it AND it is subject to Export Restrictions that the USA have long imposed on Windows in regards to encryption technologies. It is a real mine field out there if one tries to buy a copy from someone besides M$, so I am rather stuck at spending much money or just limping along with Vista and W7 Starter.
Comments
XP Mode actually runs a copy of XP as a virtual machine, you really only need it if you have something that won't install properly as a native 32 or 64 bit Win 7 app.
One "gothcha" is that your system must support hardware virtualization to run MS's Virtual PC, in the case of my Dell M6300 laptop the CPU supports it, but the BIOS does not, so I can't run XP Mode.
One other possible issue is if you want to run other virtualization applications on your machine. For example I have VMWare Workstation on my desktop machine and found that if I also installed XP Mode the VMware Workstation would no longer work. There may be a workaround, I just didn't bother doing much research and just uninstalled XP Mode.
C.W.
Also, I wonder...., is it better to use 32bit W7 if you don't have XP mode?
As it is, I am using my 64bit Quad machine in 32bit mode for both Linux and Vista. I was thinking it was about time to move up and use 64bit OSes (originally both were lacking some software and drivers).
I guess my netbook with W7 starter is fine and doesn't need an upgrade... so far.
The only reason I was trying out XP mode was as a test for a client that was interested in possibly using it.
I run VMware Workstation with various version of Windows and Office to test software.
C.W.
I have experienced a couple of pieces of software at work (the administrative software for an "antique" phone system, and a terminal emulation package) that would not run on W7, but worked great in XP mode.
I've also had a couple pieces of software that are "quirky" in W7, but more stable in XP mode.
I also have VMWare Player (stripped down Workstation) and XP mode running on the same machine just dandy. Not sure what C.W. was running into.
The ultimate reason for XP Mode was to provide an environment to run applications and/or hardware that would not run under Windows 7. The root of this probably goes back to a think called Vista, where there was a fairly wide array of hardware that did not have drivers. This didn't go over well with home users, and even less so in the "enterprise". XP Mode gave a "fall back" position in these cases.
In summary, the most common "need" for XP Mode is hardware compatibility with older, or "odd ball" hardware.
The impression I got from M$ was that XP mode was more for 'business software' and I presumed that meant that it was intended to support rather large and unwieldly relational databases hat are a hallmark of accounting software. Many companies have paid out huge sums that have locked them into one vendor for accounting and might have persuaded M$ to do something to support their needs.
So far..... I've seemed to dodge the bullet. But my primary reason for having Windows in any version is for programing microcontrollers and related software that is not available in Linux. I guess this is just one of those situations that will limp along on a case-by-case basis as OS vendors really want us to march to their orders.
Have done the same with VMWare workstation, and player. I don't think the player can be integrated, but workstation can. That's called "Unity", and when it's configured and running, just application windows appear on the screen, making things appear to be running native. Pretty slick, though not really necessary. It does remove that "looks like a VM" aspect of things, which may be desirable.
If you want to do older things, arcane things, stick with the 32 bit OS. 64 bit is fine now a days for most things. 32 bit still offers the widest compatibility.
I'm on a 64 bit OS now, mostly because I need lots of RAM. Let's just say 8GB gets tight for me at times. If it were not for that, I would do 32 bit still, just because it's a little less hassle, and I do run the odd thing that needs to be stuffed into a VM on a 64 bit machine.
With 7, I really only utilize home or pro. Home actually works for everything I do, because it runs VMWare, and so the limits on various things really doesn't matter. Pro adds the Microsoft VM capability, which can be handy, if anything to avoid converting virtual machines, and utilizing AD or Domain shared resources.
Haven't touched starter, and the higher end enterprise and ultimate seem a low value add given what pro does. Pro can be snagged for cheap, and that's always my pick, just because the features / dollar are in the sweet spot.
The Player (free version) does support Unity.
My thinking was that I might one day want to use the machine to compile software, though the mother board is physically limited to 4Gbytes of DRAM.
W7 Starter is on a little Toshiba netbook and it is hardly worth spending well over $300USD for software licenses on a $300USD netbook. It runs Open Office and free Avasta AV. But all the Parallax software seems to be happy with it.
More like allowing companies that have accounting systems built with Visual FoxPro 5 or QuickBasic 2 to keep using the software.
I don't know if you can run an XP mode vm under VMWare or VirtualBox, but the main benefit you get with XP mode is the XP license. Apart from XP mode, if you want to run XP in a vm, you need a valid license. With XP mode, it's basically covered under the Windows 7 license.
IMO, Windows 7 is a probably the best version of Windows to date. It is a bit bloated wrt the fact that it keeps a lot of metadata hanging around, such as the updates. And there are few things I like better about the way the system is administered in W2K/XP. But all said and done, it has a good mix of performance and usability.
I paid top dollar for a copy of XP - Pro in English in Taiwan with a new computer and MS Office. That never seemed to run well, constantly needed registry cleaning, image backups, and AV updates. I had made a huge mistake by thinking I could use System Mechanic for my system maintenance and Norton AV for my AV. The two fought each other - like the good old days of Apple and M$ in Real Player versus Media Player.
I will get the 64bit W7 Pro, just to say good bye to my 32bit Chinese Vista. But for now, I use Ubuntu 98% of the time. My computer use is a nicer with dual boot. If one OS is not behaving well, I can switch to the other.
And that is about 200% of what it is for a OEM copy in the USA. I can get a download from M$ for a bit less, but being in Asia is punishing.
It's not clear to me why you can't just send someone the money to buy a copy and have them mail it to you.
Yes, but the trade-off is probably awesome Chinese food.
Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. There's just no comparison. I used Vista for 2-3 years, and while I liked some of the UI improvements over XP, it always had weird performance issues. These issues simply disappeared when I switched to W7. I can honestly say that in the time I've used it (since RTM), I've never had a single blue-screen, and I can't recall any system hangs that weren't my fault.
Also, let me add that Noton AV is widely considered a poor product. I last used it about 10yrs ago, and it was practically spyware. It slowed my system to a crawl, and wouldn't uninstall. Re-installing Windows was the only way to get rid of it. From everything that I've seen online, it's about the same now. My current AV choice when running Windows is Avast Free, which has quite a few features that other free solutions are missing. The only feature it misses is that you can't schedule automatic virus scanning - you need to manually start a scan. This is no issue for me, since I very rarely do a full disk scan. But the feature set is very good, and I never notice it in opoeration, except when it blocks a web page for some reason - the desired effect.
The system's motherboard I bought only has support for 4GB of Ram, even though it is 64bit. Though it seems that via USB, I can extend RAM to more. It seems rather absurd to buy 32bit W7 Pro for a clean install when I have a 64bit desktop Quad Core 2. If anything, I may change the motherboard at some later date.
@Kevin Wood - It took quite a bit to finally remove Norton Av from my XP. One of Norton's nastinesses is that they make complete removal rather difficult. I finally learned to Google "Kill Norton".
Regarding just sending money to the US and having someone send me a copy. M$ has made it clear that they have divided the world in to regions (about six) for purposes of registrations. Additionally, M$ has an Federal Export Restriction clause in their contract.
Yes, the Chinese food is great, but computer support for a foreigner in Taiwan in English is nil.
So it seems there is some risk that I buy something in the US and will not be allowed registration after I install it. M$ only says that the computer provides a local telephone number to resolve regional registration problems - but they don''t say that they will register it.
To make matters more unclear, M$ has said that copies that are clearly marked for a region are regional and ALL OEM copies are regional. But they don't say 'unmarked' copies are world-wide.
A lot of this is payback for the simple fact that 95% of all the XP used in China and Taiwan has been illegal copies. I just don't know how nasty a DIY import might get.
My Sony Vaio Laptop has been reloaded with Windows 7 Ultimate and so far it has been bulletproof. I have it loaded with software and make it work pretty hard, but it keeps chugging along with excellent performance. My wife's HP is running Windows 7 Premium and it runs fairly well except for one issue with the sound drivers from HP.