Look out for XP mode in Windows 7.

A recent announcement by Microsoft is, for a change, very exciting. It seems that if you buy Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you will be able to download XPM, it is not included by default for anti-trust reasons. So what then, is this here XP mode? Quite simply, it is a virtual machine, based on the Virtual PC that you can already download from the Microsoft website.

The difference is that if you download XPM, you also get a fully licensed copy of XP SP3 as a virtual machine. Big, fat, hairy, and deal, I hear you say, and if it stopped there, I would agree with you. The cool bit of XPM is that if you install an application on the virtual machine, it publishes a shortcut on the host as well. Therefore you can run all those apps that won’t run in Windows 7 natively, without opening your virtual machine. It will run on the W7 desktop along your native apps.

This all means that all the bloat code in Vista and W7 that is there for backward compatibility could eventually be stripped out. It also means that if you do have old applications that won’t run on W7, you can now install them, and the end user is none the wiser. It uses some components of RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to perform this magic.

Of course, there is are caveats. One is that you need at least 2GB of RAM. Not so tough huh? Well your CPU needs to have support enabled as well. From the AMD 64 processors onwards, you will be in luck, but with Intel, support for hardware visualization is a bit more on the patchy side. However there are tools that you can run to see if you have the ability.

As soon as I can get my hands on a copy I will get a review up. Until then, hurah for Microsoft for this move.