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The Microsoft Robotics Studio is supposed to be really good. And why provide drivers? I hope the interface to the sensors is really simple and fully documented.

Last time I checked, IE came bundled with Mac OS and Mac OS X as well and follows standards about as well as IE on Windows. How's the lock-in argument work now?

I strongly suggest you check it again.

Windows had this functionality since day one. Lookup AdjustTokenPrivileges() on MSDN

I am not a programmer, but it appears using proprietary closed architectures such as Flash/Shockwave might not be the wisest and most secure solution for an active browser plug-in.
(Or did the inventing source coders/programmers get 86ed following the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia and now Adobe can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together again?)

Are there any GPL'd Open Source browser plug-ins that can preform equivalent functionality to Flash/Shockwave?

Or... are we either left without, or to install .NET v1, v2, v3, v3.5, etc... and then utilize the proprietary Microsoft Silverlight plug-in? (And is it any better, safer, or more trustworthy?) http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/faq.aspx
What of the non-Windows users who can't install ".NET Libraries"?

Answer: Yes.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605

put Windows in a feak'n sandbox/VM where it really belongs and run any 'special needs' applications there instead of giving some Microsoft OEM the profits of tying Windows to the hardware.

Not allowed with Vista, according to the EULA:

4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

Wow, how can this be insightful.
You are 100% correct about a 64 bit kernel not supporting 32 bit DRIVERS (unless a kernel level emulation layer is implemented). The thing to keep in mind is that most of the other OSes (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, and IBM z/OS) have control of their own drivers, and therefore can more easily implement kernel level changes such as 64 bit support, which requires driver and library modifications.
Linux is not mentioned above, because it does have 3rd party drivers (kernel modiules). If the source is provided, and the system is already running a 64 bit Linux kernel, then it is fairly non-trivial to compile the module with 64 bit support.

All of these OSes have had 64 bit operating systems for at least a decade, if not more. Supercomputers and their operating systems had 64 bit support back in the 60's, Solaris had 64 bit hardware in 1997 and a 64 bit operating system in the late 90's. In the grand scheme of things, the X86 chipset, and thus Windows X86 is very new to the 64 bit world. (keep in mind, that Windows NT on alpha had 64 bit support in the 1999-2000 timeframe, but again, the scope of drivers was limited so this was not an as difficult migration).

Microsoft faces the problem that drivers for Windows come from thousands of sources/vendors. Every little piece of hardware that windows supports, has a driver. This has worked well for Microsoft because the Driver API was very open, and pluggable, allowing for all these vendors to support the Windows OS.

The problem Microsoft faces now is that all of those millions of drivers from thousands of people need to be recompiled, following a strict set of rules (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/kernel/64bit_chklist.mspx) to support the 64 bit operating system.

Until Microsoft provides a kernel level emulation layer to allow 32 bit drivers to continue to function on its 64 bit X86 operating system, or 5 years pass allowing all these drivers to be re-built, the drivers will continue to be a barrier for Windows to a player in the 64 bit OS space.

The other OSes did not have as many 3rd party drivers floating around, but microsoft is faced with this unique situation.

When you really think about it, how stupid would it be if a large government agency even in the US sent out a "document meant for editing" in a microsoft office format.

To constrain compatibility issues, Windows XP Service Pack 2 includes hardware abstraction layer (HAL) changes that mimic the 32-bit HAL DMA behavior. The altered HAL grants unlimited map registers when the system is running in PAE mode. In addition, the kernel memory manager ignores any physical address above 4 GB. Any system RAM beyond the 4 GB barrier would be made unaddressable by Windows and be unusable in the system. By limiting the address space to 4 GB, devices with 32-bit DMA bus master capability will not see a transaction with an address above the 4 GB barrier. Because these changes remove the need to double-buffer the transactions, they avoid a class of bugs in some drivers related to proper implementation of double buffering support.

Windows 32-bit operating systems really do not play well with more than 3Gb of memory. Check out what Microsoft says about it.

1. Check all autorun entries using autoruns
2. Repeat step 1
3. If there are entires which had come back use process explorer to kill them
4. Should the processes be respawning each other (tag teaming) then proceed to the alternative method
5. Reboot
6. Delete files that where being added and probably find other similar looking crap and delete that too

1. Reboot in safe mode
2. Use autoruns
3. Delete crap

1. Check all autorun entries using autoruns
2. Repeat step 1
3. If there are entires which had come back use process explorer to kill them
4. Should the processes be respawning each other (tag teaming) then proceed to the alternative method
5. Reboot
6. Delete files that where being added and probably find other similar looking crap and delete that too

1. Reboot in safe mode
2. Use autoruns
3. Delete crap

1. Check all autorun entries using autoruns
2. Repeat step 1
3. If there are entires which had come back use process explorer to kill them
4. Should the processes be respawning each other (tag teaming) then proceed to the alternative method
5. Reboot
6. Delete files that where being added and probably find other similar looking crap and delete that too

1. Reboot in safe mode
2. Use autoruns
3. Delete crap

OMFG. You are serious. The Jet database has long been considered deprecated by Microsoft.

they are called "zones" put sites you trust in "trusted sites" and once you dont in "restricted" you can configure each of the zones (there are 5 but only 4 visible) security settings to however paranoid or trusting you are of the sites you visit, each setting is independent eg turn off script on normal internet surfing but only allowing certain sites to use

they are called "zones" put sites you trust in "trusted sites" and once you dont in "restricted" you can configure each of the zones (there are 5 but only 4 visible) security settings to however paranoid or trusting you are of the sites you visit, each setting is independent eg turn off script on normal internet surfing but only allowing certain sites to use

If Microsoft keeps on going the way they are going, we might actually arrive back at text-only email at some time in the near future.

> It turns on ClearType. Globally. It can't be turned off (well, without a lot of work.)

Not that you're missing much with IE7, but have you tried unchecking Tools > Options > Advanced > Multimedia > Always use ClearType for HTML and restarting IE?

> ClearType anti-aliases fonts.

Also, I don't think ClearType applies anti-aliasing across the board -- in fact cleartype text has more jaggies than standard font-smoothed text produced using Windows' old method -- here's an example.

AFAIK ClearType tunes the letter forms in multiple ways (including using subtly different shaping rules -- this works especially well if the font has been designed with ClearType in mind, e.g., Consolas and Candara). This makes screen text at 11-18px (the vast majority of UI text) much easier to read.

If you have a LCD monitor you might want to set Windows to globally enable ClearType and try the Windows ClearType tuner powertoy -- well-tuned Cleartype fonts really do look a lot better with it on for *most* people.

Visual Studio is nice but it's just a glorified code generator, a RAD tool. All .NET programs can be written without Visual Studio using just the compilers and utilities that come free wit hthe .NET framework Redistributable and SDK. Third-party, even open source RAD development tools exist. I believe you can even write it and compile it in Eclipse too with an add-in/plugin or whatever it's called. A text editor will do just fine.

Leaning towards arguments of strict "Microsoft-only" statements and lockin is leaning towards the past. Currently a lot is in transition. It's not there yet, but it's definately moving towards "there" ... wherever that may be but it will continue to encompass more than just the Windows platform.

I didn't say Microsoft invented IPv6, I said they've spent significant research resources on it. They were some of the first people to implement IPv6 and provide an open source license for it. Microsoft Research fellows helped with the standardization process. See http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/

Don't confuse Multi-Processing with Parallel Processing. They have commonality, and technically SMP is part of PP, but it's only a subset. You need to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing and pay close attention to the article on Automatic Parallelization. It's true that Parallel computing has been around for decades, but software still has not matured to support it. Much research is being done by many organizations on this, so don't flippantly dismiss it. And yes, it is new and inventive.

If you want to see Microsoft Research contributions to real products, check this page http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/pastpresentfuture/contributions.aspx

I didn't say Microsoft invented IPv6, I said they've spent significant research resources on it. They were some of the first people to implement IPv6 and provide an open source license for it. Microsoft Research fellows helped with the standardization process. See http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/

Don't confuse Multi-Processing with Parallel Processing. They have commonality, and technically SMP is part of PP, but it's only a subset. You need to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing and pay close attention to the article on Automatic Parallelization. It's true that Parallel computing has been around for decades, but software still has not matured to support it. Much research is being done by many organizations on this, so don't flippantly dismiss it. And yes, it is new and inventive.

If you want to see Microsoft Research contributions to real products, check this page http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/pastpresentfuture/contributions.aspx

What, like Windows Workflow Foundation?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow

Or Sharepoint workflows?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/CH100667661033.aspx

What, like Windows Workflow Foundation?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow

Or Sharepoint workflows?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/CH100667661033.aspx

I'm don't know much about other areas but when it comes to programming languages MS has been pretty good at moving stuff from research to production.

I've been following Don Syme's work for a couple of years. Here's a guy that wrote the foundation for CLR generics, then he created F# which is now being moved into production.

Or take a look at Comega which laid the foundation for C# 3.0 and will probably also form a foundation for pragmatic parallelism in C# 4.0.

Or take a look at the Task Parallel Library which does some cool research topics like task stealing that I haven't seen implemented anywhere else yet.

When it comes to other MS software I don't see much improvement but I use very few MS products. The Office Ribbon definitely looks like a giant improvement over the toolbars and menus but that's cosmetic.

The depressing thing is that I see way more cool stuff coming out of Microsoft than from the GPL-loving crowd. FireFox 3.0, provided that it delivers on better bookmarks management, may be the first big thing I've seen in years. OpenOffice is still a bad clone of MS Office, Thunderbird is a giant fucking disappointment (how a product may be worse than Outlook or Outlook Express is beyond me), and the multi-protocol chat clients have more switches than a Boeing 747.

So how about something that impresses us you GPL-loving freaks? ;) Take something like face recognition which has been proved to have too many errors to be useful for finding terrorists at airports and create an awesome application that can tag my pictures by people who are in them automatically.

Dejan

I'm don't know much about other areas but when it comes to programming languages MS has been pretty good at moving stuff from research to production.

I've been following Don Syme's work for a couple of years. Here's a guy that wrote the foundation for CLR generics, then he created F# which is now being moved into production.

Or take a look at Comega which laid the foundation for C# 3.0 and will probably also form a foundation for pragmatic parallelism in C# 4.0.

Or take a look at the Task Parallel Library which does some cool research topics like task stealing that I haven't seen implemented anywhere else yet.

When it comes to other MS software I don't see much improvement but I use very few MS products. The Office Ribbon definitely looks like a giant improvement over the toolbars and menus but that's cosmetic.

The depressing thing is that I see way more cool stuff coming out of Microsoft than from the GPL-loving crowd. FireFox 3.0, provided that it delivers on better bookmarks management, may be the first big thing I've seen in years. OpenOffice is still a bad clone of MS Office, Thunderbird is a giant fucking disappointment (how a product may be worse than Outlook or Outlook Express is beyond me), and the multi-protocol chat clients have more switches than a Boeing 747.

So how about something that impresses us you GPL-loving freaks? ;) Take something like face recognition which has been proved to have too many errors to be useful for finding terrorists at airports and create an awesome application that can tag my pictures by people who are in them automatically.

Dejan

From your referenced article:

"The following is a partial list of other technologies that began in Microsoft Research and later moved into Microsoft products, demonstrating the extensive success of the company's distinctive technology transfer approach.

[...]

• IPv6 is an implementation of the Internet Protocol version 6 that is fully supported in the shipping version of the operating system

What in the everliving FUCK!? Am I reading that wrong, or is Microsoft literally claiming to have come up with IPv6?

Among other things, they apparently claim to have invented public key cryptography, text-to-speech, spam-filtering, clustering (at least insofar as SQL), and photography analysis tools...

Dude, something ain't right, there...

/P

Actually, a lot of MS Research ends up in MS products. For example, the IPv6 stack in Vista was originally a MS Research project. Vista's voice recognition system is another.

The problem with all fields of research (as opposed to Development) is that most often, the results are published in journals and papers years before the technology makes it into a product, then when it finally becomes "productized" everyone yawns because "that's so old", when in reality in terms of finished products it's not.

As a good example, Microsoft is spending a ton of research on parallel processing. There are even some benefits leaking out into the real world like the Parellel Extensions to .NET.

Another good example was Microsoft Photosynth, also a Microsoft Research project that became a real-world technology.

Frankly, if you can't see any innovation coming from Microsoft, you're simply either biased, falling for the propoganda, or just not looking.

Looks pretty sharp to me. Maybe you need to turn down the contrast.

Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.

First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.

LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the .NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in .NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).

VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.

XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.

Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo

Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?

F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.

Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do
Windows 2 Apples

TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.

It goes on and on.

Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.

Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.

Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.

First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.

LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the .NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in .NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).

VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.

XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.

Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo

Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?

F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.

Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do
Windows 2 Apples

TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.

It goes on and on.

Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.

Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.

In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?

Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.

While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..

I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.

ash

In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?

Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.

While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..

I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.

ash

In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?

Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.

While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..

I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.

ash

In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?

Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.

While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..

I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.

ash

In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?

Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.

While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..

I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.

ash

I don't think that means what you think it means. I'm sure that there are lots of "innovative" patents in MS's portfolio, though I'm certain that many were purchased elsewhere rather than developed in house.

It does not seem that you are qualified to comment on the shortcomings of others, you need to work on yourself first. Those interested in what MS actually does in house might want to look at Micorsoft Research's project page: http://research.microsoft.com/research/projects/default.aspx.

Also, out of house research is not necessarily patented. A friend did research on distributed shared computing in grad school. The project was supported by Microsoft, they had access to Windows source code, they were not restricted from publishing their research.

http://www.research.ibm.com/areas.shtml

http://research.microsoft.com/research/default.aspx

There's no real contest though. If they were course listings, one reads like MIT and the other like a community college.

Microsoft Research is really cool. They crank out cool stuff all the time! Take a look! The problem is that most of their stuff never sees the light of day. MS just gets the patent then bury it and move on. WinFS and other neat things came out of there. They hire a lot of PhDs, too... James Larus, the guy that wrote SPIM (MIPS simulator) works there now...

Wow, it seems like the OP's view of microsoft is completely informed by Slashdot. Perhaps she ought to do a little more research. Microsoft has a slew of other products (http://support.microsoft.com/select/?target=hub) and seems to be doing better than keeping Office on life support (http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1198184400000&chddm=492269&q=NASDAQ:MSFT).

You are correct. It's been 4 years since Microsoft has developed IE for the Mac and two years since it was supported. ;). See here. Even though this is the case, a certain individual at my university will complain to our web team that a page doesn't work correctly with Mac IE.

You're missing the odd, even version theory, products with odd numbers tend to suck more than ones with even numbers.

However, word is out that MS has released a patch for IE6 which crashes the computer running XPSP2, in almost all circumstances. I suspect this was done on purpose to get people to Vista and/or IE 7.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946627

Yes, Microsoft has a fix, but it requires hacking the registry. Read the warning message in the KB article and tell me if that is something the average user is willing to attempt?

From the page:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

It explains why they've switched to the Word rendering engine for Outlook. The fewer places they're standards compliant, the better for their lockin.

Scripting is very much present in Windows. Apart from the old-fashioned batch scripting, Windows has a built-in scripting engine which can by default be programmed with JScript or VBScript, which are (vastly) simplified versions of JavaScript and Visual Basic. See here. The big thing about them is you can access COM objects, Active Directory and the Windows Management Instrumentation.

1. Virtual PC 2007 does not run on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic, or even Windows Vista Home Premium.
2. After June 30, 2008, Microsoft will stop distributing copies of Windows XP to run in Virtual PC.
3. I am not convinced that device drivers will run as expected in Virtual PC.

Ugh. He said decent -that disqualifies Virtualbox, sorry.

You can get virtual pc 2007 and VMware Server for free. If you have the money to spend, VMware workstation 6 is your best bet.

Avoid everything else (virtual box and qemu specifically) like the fucking plague -at least until one or both of them improve a hell of a lot more in the speed department.