Microsoft made headlines today by announcing that Windows 7 would include a new compatibility mode to run Windows XP applications. This "compatibility mode" would be in essence a copy of virtual PC with a complete Windows XP SP3 image running inside it.
This would means that you would have a whole second PC virtualized on you machine. This may look like a good news, but it is not for several reasons:
1) The "compatibility mode" will only be available for the professional, enterprise or ultimate versions of Windows . For the rest of us, no XP compatibility unless we pay for an expensive upgrade.
2) Microsoft's virtualization technology is much less advanced than Vmware or VirtuaBox. This means that important multimedia components such as 3D acceleration (DirectX, OpenGL), hardware Video processing and sound processing acceleration will probably not be supported, so don't expect to be able to run an old version of powerDVD
3) Resources usage of Virtualization is very high! Since you need to run a whole second PC in addition of windows 7 (already a memory hog) you will need to have a really large amount of memory. On vista most users reported that Virtualization only start to work acceptably with 4 GBs of memory, and becomes comfortable at 8 GBs. This rules out this solution for all netbooks and most existing PCs, as only recent motherboards will support more than 4 GBs of memory.
All in all it looks like Microsoft is trying to court enterprise customers while leaving the rest of us without a solution (unless we pay them more money). This is not the way to treat your customers! I would have much prefered that they continue to support the Windows XP
UPDATE: The register made a review of Xp mode.
Read more in the Windows category.
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