Last night, I attended the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Event publicised by Jonathan below. I hadn’t attended any of the VBUG stuff before, thinking it probably wouldn’t be that relevant to my work and interests, being (as I had thought) aimed more at techie VB/Powershell developers. How wrong!
The talk was entirely relevant and I’m actually very glad I went because it made me realise that I’d made some incorrect assumptions about Windows 7. One item, in particular, set off some alarm bells…
XP Mode – the answer to all our prayers for running legacy Windows XP applications on Windows 7 on all our existing PCs – wrong! XP Mode requires Windows 7 Virtual PC which in turn requires hardware virtualisation support on the motherboard. Hardware virtualisation on machines older than 1 or 2 years is simply non-existent. Even some new laptops and PCs don’t come with hardware virtualisation and even when they do, it isn’t always possible to switch it on!
It is a shame that Microsoft have insisted on developing XP Mode to work only when hardware virtualisation is present as it seems to be in opposition to the purpose of XP Mode. Given that Windows 7 will run so well on older kit where Vista wouldn’t, and you can get away with much less memory, it just seems senseless that XP Mode needs brand new boxes in order to work. One can only get cynical about these things… and wonder about the Intel sales and marketing influence…
But the real message here is: if you want to run XP Mode make sure you’re buying machines that fully support hardware virtualisation.
There’s plenty of good news though. With improved deployment utilities for Windows 7, we are looking at a lot quicker turn around times for getting driver support into images. Bitlocker setup is a much more straight-forward process in Windows 7 and ‘Bitlocker To Go’ means USB pen drives can be easily encrypted with little technical know-how required. UAC is now fully working and is far less intrusive than in Vista. Allegedly the User State Migration Tools now work too… we’ll see.
All in all, last night’s talk was enjoyable and very informative, with an excellent and knowledgeable speaker, who really knew his stuff.
The VBUG group are taking a summer break but will be back in September to host some more events in conjunction with Microsoft Professionals. They are wanting ideas for topics to cover so please post your ideas on this blog.
I’ve been looking into this a bit today because I expect we’re going to be using it at some point. Intel have a list of Core 2s that support hardware virtualisation. Take a look at http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/core2duo.htm and http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/core2quad.htm
The Intel VT column indicates whether the CPU supports it. As far as motherboards go, I’ve checked RM Expert 3030 and 3040 machines and they both seem to support switching virtualisation on in the BIOS (though it seems to be off by default). These machines both use Intel boards – I suspect most Intel boards should work fine.
Just about every machine I’ve seen with VT available has it off by default, both server and desktop. Note that Atom chips don’t have VT, so nearly all netbooks will not bea able to use this (the Samsung NC20 being a notable exception as it uses a VIA CPU)
The release candidate of XP Mode came out yesterday and one of the enhancements is that it’s now incorporated into the Windows Upgrade Advisor to “allow typical users to see if their PCs can run Windows XP Mode and if they need additional steps to achieve this goal”.
Handy.