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A Mixed Review For Windows 7's XP Mode

Posted by timothy on from the weak-solution dept.

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."

4 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As pointelss as... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's often strange how one thing will remind us of another completely unrelated thing. The human mind is a confusing beast.

  2. This is familiar.. by Bandman · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
  3. Re:What's missing? by commlinx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Did they really change enough to warrant something like this? What is Win7 lacking that prevents older applications from running?

    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.

  4. You know it's bad when by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).