Slashdot Mirror
A Mixed Review For Windows 7's XP Mode
The Register writes "If one thing excited people more than the disclosure of the Windows 7 Release Candidate's availability, it was the news of Windows 7 XP Mode. The Reg's Tim Anderson gave Windows XP Mode a mixed report in his review of the Windows 7/Virtual PC combo. Overall, the level of integration is excellent and Windows XP Mode showed strong potential. However, responsiveness of applications was sluggish and the seamless integration between Windows 7 and XP proved confusing."
...Overall, the level of integration is excellent and Windows XP Mode showed strong potential. However, responsiveness of applications was sluggish and the seamless integration between Windows 7 and XP proved confusing...
I submit:
In the above quoted statement, substitute KDE 4.x for Windows 7 and KDE 3.5 for Windows XP. It still makes sense.
Ironic to say the least.
The feature your customer base is most excited about in your new product is that it can run the years old version nearly as well as the old version would run on the bare hardware (if they could get a license for that).
MS needs to kill backwards compatibility and start over on windows.
True.
But backwards compatibility is the only real reason why people buy Windows, so by killing compatibility for technical reasons, they'd kill the commercial reason for using Windows.
Ya in general use, you find no problems. I'd place Vista 64-bit as having a compatibility between 99%-99.9% I've used all kinds of apps including engineering software, video editors, DAWs, game, compilers, and so on and nearly everything works without flaw. However there are apps that don't. Some can be fixed by hacking around with settings, though that is beyond many users, but some just flat out don't work. They are all old, of course, some of them are 16-bit apps (64-bit Windows doesn't have a compatibility layer for 16-bit).
So something like this is useful for the old apps that are still needed, but never getting upgraded. Hell at work (engineering department at a university) we have some computer that run DOSBox to run old DOS apps, because that's the only thing that controls a given piece of hardware.
While most apps get updated for current systems, not all do. In fact, not even all hardware does. For example if you search around, you can located modern motherboards, like Core 2 boards, with ISA slots. Now why the hell would you want that? I mean even PCI is now on the deprecation list. Well, because some companies in very specialized fields are stuck in the past. Our chip fab has that problem. They have equipment which only has an ISA interface to the computer and the company refuses to make a PCI one. Thus, it is either use an old computer, or buy a new board with ISA support.
So this XP layer is kinda like the ISA boards: Not needed for the majority of people out there (hence why it isn't in there by default) but available for those stubborn apps that won't update.
Programs written correctly, following the documentation for Windows 95+, still work fine in Vista. There aren't a ton of these.
The problem Microsoft is dealing with is the thousands of applications written using undocumented functions, diving directly into implementation data structures without using the API, saving files in places they shouldn't (i.e. blithely saving temp files into /Program Files without using the API which returns the correct folder for temp files-- lots of video games do this), relying on specific undocumented side-effects of API functions, etc. In short, for every way something COULD have been done wrong, it HAS been done wrong sometime in Windows history.
The reason Vista is incompatible is that Microsoft finally took the plunge and changed the layout/size of those internal data structures, had to remove 16-bit support (for 64-bit CPU reasons), and started enforcing the correct permissions (no write access to Program Files) for security purposes.
Many of those thousands of buggy applications can never be fixed-- the source code is gone, or the company responsible is out of business. So the XP layer helps users run those applications, while also letting Microsoft actually *improve* their OS in the way that Apple and Linux (systems who don't give half a whit for backwards compatibility) can.
Comment of the year