virtualbox.org

(Microsoft Virtual PC with) XPM claims to very cleanly run anything that gets the "you can't run this" 32 bit app on Win 7 just as though the restriction is removed. It sounds like magic fairy dust. (footnote *) Sounds like: without XPM, you get the your-screwed-messagebox; with it, it just runs. All it costs is running that process, and of course that you use the productivity-impaired Win7 interface instead of XP.

It is that sweet? Should I consider it a viable alternative to VB? (If you say no I'll save my time and not bother!)

* You can read this on the web, file
Windows XP Mode for Windows 7_brochure.pdf
"Seamless Applications—publish and launch applications installed on Virtual Windows XP directly from the Windows 7 desktop, as if they were installed on the Windows 7 host itself.

Folder Integration between host and guest—access your Windows 7 Known Folders, such as My Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Music, Video, from inside the Virtual Windows XP environment.

Clipboard Sharing—cut and paste between your Windows 7 host and any virtual machine."

This is a question for another forum (MS VirtualPC) I'm afraid. I didn't see any VirtualBox related question here.

I really expected a full frontal debunking, simultaneously describing the virtues of and praising VB, which I didn't think anyone would mind. Like national pride or team spirit or such, LOL.

I actually thought I'd get a more "academically honest" answer here - no disrespect to those users, but they would likely be too biased in favor of their Microsoft product rather to debunk it. Frankly in my observation the uber-experienced forum participants here seem to give better advice.

I.e. my intent is to relate this to VB.

I doubt you'll find much interest here in contrasting XP mode vs VirtualBox, since none of us are XP mode users, nor plan to be. XP mode was a short term bait and switch to encourage people to move away from XP. It never existed as a fully fledged VM platform.

In addition, Windows 7 with XP mode was released in 2009. A discussion along these lines was probably relevant back then. No doubt I was involved. I can't imagine why anyone would find this discussion interesting and relevant in late 2015.

Thank you for a genuinely useful response. I'll accept your explanation and assessment. I do note that in my research I see that it was a "thing" in 2009 and most googling lands there, but indeed plenty of current articles/sites, credible sounding ones, still list it as a legitimate alternative (along with VMWare), rightly or wrongly. I was surprised that until you replied no one was willing to give any assessment of XP mode (except a "forget about it") but I understand if as you say no one here has any current connection to it.

I'm probably over my head in this forum anyway though so thanks for bearing with me. While I'm a badass application programmer and user, in an I.T. sense I'm a baby, only interested in one simple machine on one simple platform and I likely won't even change that for 3 or 4 years, compared to users here who either do or easily could pull apart and put together systems several times per day on multiple platforms. I will go ahead with VB now, but refrain from this advanced forum and hopefully I'll locate a better one for my questions as I try to configure and so forth. I just hope I don't have to soil myself with the [nowadays] insipid Yahoo Answers (and insipid is putting it kindly)

IHate Gates wrote:but indeed plenty of current articles/sites, credible sounding ones, still list it as a legitimate alternative (along with VMWare), rightly or wrongly

Well, after Win7 came Win8, Win8.1 and Win10, none of which had any direct equivalent of XP mode, and even when it was current XP mode had official support for exactly one guest OS in combo with exactly one flavor of host OS... so I find it hard to believe there can be many current sites on the Internet that fail to recognize the significance of these facts: XP mode was a very limited and short term tool intended to enable people to buy into Win7 without totally abandoning XP - MS needed a success after the marketing disaster that was Vista. The market has moved on and XP mode is now of historical interest only for most.

One thing XP mode had going for it: because it was so narrowly focused (Win7 host, XP guest) it could include tools that allowed it to integrate perfectly with the host. Fine if you can live with the limitations. This level of integration isn't so easy when installing an off the shelf OS into a generic VM platform, but installing the Guest Additions (supported OS's only) can get you pretty close.

VirtualBox runs on all popular host platforms and can be used to run almost any guest OS you could think of, plus VirtualBox is actively maintained and doesn't have any agenda other than providing a useful lifeboat / sandbox / test environment. There is really very little to compare the two environments.


Please stick around. I'm sure you'll enjoy the discussion here, and be a valuable asset, once you've used VirtualBox long enough to have identified and discarded your preconceptions.

Nothing magical or mystical about Windows XP Mode, it's all pretty straightforward.

Windows XP Mode is a type 2 hypervisor, just like VirtualBox, and conceptually works the same way. However, it's severely limited in that the host OS must be Windows 7 and the guest OS must be Windows XP. In addition, it has poor hardware support in the guest, poor performance etc. so it's not a brilliant solution.

IHate Gates wrote:"Seamless Applications—publish and launch applications installed on Virtual Windows XP directly from the Windows 7 desktop, as if they were installed on the Windows 7 host itself.

This kind of marketing text refers to XP Mode's seamless mode, which conceptually works the same way as VirtualBox's seamless mode. While a guest OS is running in XP mode, you can hide most of the guest desktop and only display individual guest windows, so you can view them side-by-side with windows of the host. VirtualBox is able to do the same thing.

While visually interesting, and you can create shortcuts to it in the Start Menu, seamless mode doesn't imply any mixing of the guest applications with the host operating system.

XPM claims to very cleanly run anything that gets the "you can't run this" 32 bit app on Win 7 just as though the restriction is removed. It sounds like magic fairy dust.

This just refers to the fact that 16-bit applications can't run in 64-bit Windows 7. However, the guest OS in XPM is 32-bit Windows XP, so the same applications can happily run inside XPM.

The release of Windows 7 more or less coincided with a greater push to get people to run 64-bit OS version. This resulted in many compatibility problems. XPM works around this because the guest is 32-bit. It is not magic fairy dust, it's quite simple actually.

In conclusion, there is nothing to debunk. Those features you mention, while somewhat embellished as marketing speech, are there and are pretty standard. VirtualBox has those features too and does them better.