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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
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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.
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).
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.
Reply to self:
Notably the popular program Internet Explorer 6.0.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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 #!