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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."
It's often strange how one thing will remind us of another completely unrelated thing. The human mind is a confusing beast.
If one thing exited people
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means...
I am anarch of all I survey.
It sounds like OS X with the OS 9 compatibility layer...
Except for the part where OS 9 wasn't better than OS X
Check out my sysadmin blog!
...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.
I find it disturbing that people could become become acclimated enough to Vista's horrendous interface that XP is somehow confusing.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Then I could watch YouTube in fullscreen. Maybe this could be a way of solving legacy code problems. Why make a new OS backward compatible when you can completely scrap old code. Use a virtual OS for backward compatibility.
When I moved to Vista x64 I created a few VMWare XP virtual machines and it did ease the pain of having a handful of applications that wouldn't run under Vista. It's probably not aimed so much at mainstream applications that will have any Windows 7 incompatibilities patched quickly, more at a few legacy niche applications that may otherwise prevent an enterprise from moving to Windows 7.
As another example I have a few USB device programmers and other electronics gear that are end of life so don't have Vista USB drivers, however they would have been expensive to replace so there's no way I would have moved to Vista without being able to use them under a VM.
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).
This is a VM integrated graphically into the Win7 GUI. FTA: "Most of the features called Windows XP Mode are really features of the new Windows Virtual PC." Their "virtual application support" for the top Win7 editions just makes it more convenient.
Did you even read the article?
I actually tend to like Windows and other Microsoft products but for some reason whenever they have to make a change for security or try to integrate something new, they seem to do so in a completely confusing way. For instance, could the extra security on IE 6&7 for allowing active x controls be any worse? What about the macro warning on basically any useful Access DB? It wouldn't surprise me if the XP compatibility feature in Win 7 is indeed a confusing mess. My theory is that they design this stuff by committee rather than having one smart person architect the stupid stuff. Thus, interface and process design gets convoluted and confusing. Ok, so this is all still in beta but it often surprises me why a lot of this stuff gets to public beta before people notice the confusion. I think the UAC was a good example of this... it should have never got out the door in its initial state.
I was just thinking that occasionally Linux runs Windows applications better than Windows. So, could I use Wine on Windows 7 and forget all about that VM hassle and sluggishness?
Word I heard is that because PCs can't virtualize devices that an XP VM under W7 will run like crap - although on AMD processors it will be a little less like crap due to better memory virtualization than Intel yet has.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So skip it and go straight to Win2k. No "authentication" nonsense with that.
Did you even read the article?
You mean, we are supposed to read it ?
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
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.
Compare OS/2's virtualisation of Windows 3.x. OS/2 still launches the app, but it does not do a graphic repaint of the current host screen to do this.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
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.
So MS should do a total rewrite of Windows? Oh yeah, theres no chance that would turn into a massive boondoggle, the software development version of a giant pit you shovel money into and never get anything out of.
While I agree theres definitely a ton of legacy crap to be thrown out, it works. While I'm sure the programmers will be happy, a total rewrite means throwing away a decade of lessons learned the hard way.
Apple had a lot of advantages in their situation that MS does not. For one thing, they controlled all the hardware. This meant no massive effort to get drivers made for an os that is still years away.
The mac development community was much smaller, tighter knit, and connected with Apple then Window's has ever been. They supported it because Mac OS X would bring a lot of things missing in 9 that caused them a ton of headaches. There was very little in the way of custom in-house apps written for Mac, because there was very little corporate mac use period.
Finally, and perhaps the biggest, was the fact that for most users, their experience with the new OS would be on new hardware, at a time when hardware was improving at break neck speeds. There is a much bigger difference to the end user between a 200 mhz processor and a 400 mhz processor then a 2 ghz and 4 ghz.
The PC world and the Mac world are different. Apple firmly leads the Mac world. Microsoft is the big dog of the pc world but as Vista has shown, it has limits. Backwards compatibility is one of their biggest selling points. Windows works, its not alway pretty, but it works. Tossing out something that works to start over is the quick path to having nothing at all.
XP mode is for use of internal apps, NOT games. That is why it is shipping with the business line.
Reply to self:
Notably the popular program Internet Explorer 6.0.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
He has a 3 GB RAM machine, and left the VM size at 256 MB. I was getting sluggishness at work with XP installed in 512 MB VMware VM's. Even minimalist and cheapo netbooks come with 1 GB minimum, to properly run XP (and Home edition, at that). Try installing XP (SP3) and Word on an actual PC with only 256 MB of RAM, and then load them up and I'll bet it's sluggish as well.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Several Vista users I know hate it so much they asked me to install VirtualBox running XP - after they saw it running on my wife's Mac. (She only uses it because some sites use browser plugins not available for OS X - another effect of the monopoly).
you had me at #!
You must be new here.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
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.
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