Run old applications in Windows 7 using Windows XP mode!

Windows XP Mode is a new virtualization feature to be available to Windows 7 users running the Ultimate, Professional or Enterprise versions of the operating system. This is basically a revamped version of Microsoft Virtual PC and a pre-configure Windows XP virtual machine.

The beauty of this set up is that you can have your XP applications run just as if they were installed in Windows 7. There is a folder created in your start menu that allows you to launch these applications with a single click without having to load the XP virtual machine manually each time. In effect, the XP virtual machine will be running in the background when these applications are being used but it’s transparent to the user.

As of the present time, XP Mode is still in beta and requires you to download and install Windows Virtual PC. Both are freely available as beta versions from the Microsoft website. The requirements to run XP Mode are as follows:

  1. Windows 7 (Ultimate, Professional or Enterprise)
  2. Hard disk: 2GB for installing Windows XP Mode. Addtional 15GB of hard disk space for the virtual Windows environment.
  3. A processor capable of hardware virtualization, with AMD-V™ or Intel® VT (use this handy little application to find out if you have this capability)

If all these conditions are met you can download XP Mode, Windows Virtual PC and install them. I’ve been using this set up for a few days now and it’s very handy to run some older applications that do not work well under Vista or 7. You can also use Windows Virtual PC to create new virtual machines or run existing ones that were created with older versions (it even runs my eComStation 2.0 RC5 vm).

Cheers!
~TheNerd

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Comments

unable to open old vacbi in windows7 even after downloading the xp mode. after downloading do i require to change files to open my vacbi.

Thanks for you info and clarity. It answered my question fully.Sined

same problem for me unable to open old vacbi in windows7 even after downloading the xp mode

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