It is worth noting that the default settings of XP Mode, are set to give the virtual machine 256MB of RAM. Once you are up and running you will find yourself in familiar territory, if you have used Virtual PC in the past. More about this later.įinally a quick wizard asks you a few easy questions and boom! It also goes a step further to even integrate notifications in the host’s system tray area. It allows you to run applications installed on the XP Mode machine directly from the host operating system. This really is quite clever but nothing new in the virtualisation space. Initially, Virtual PC will initialise the XP Mode image and this can take a few minutes.ĭuring the initialisation, Virtual PC enables a feature called “Integration Services”.

Once everything is installed, it really is extremely easy to get started. Under Windows 7, Virtual PC integrates really easily with XP Mode. Unlike previous versions, this one does take advantage of virtualisation features of processors such as Intel VT etc. Simply this is a newer version of Virtual PC simply named Windows Virtual PC. It is available for XP SP3, Vista and Windows 7. Windows Virtual PC – is the second Beta download available from MSDN. So far that doesn’t sound too impressive right? Hold on and I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Simply a pre-configured virtual machine image. So as you can see XP Mode is called Virtual Windows XP. Below are a couple of screenshots of the installation process. It requires Windows 7 and it is nothing more than a pre-installed Virtual Machine Image File. XP Mode – Currently in Beta and available for download from MSDN. There seems to be some confusion over some of the terms & names used in this technology.

Windows 7 RC is out, and as promised here’s a first look at XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC.

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