XP is not dead. It’s very much alive. Vista is the one that seems dead to me.
Well, I guess that XP really is the new Classic now (and yes, what everyone said: having an officially blessed virtualization solution available in a major operating system release, that was exactly Classic (MacOS 9) on Mac OS X; nothing new here).
In my not so humble opinion, they should have done this long ago with Vista, allowing Vista to be a cleaner break: making full changes instead of half-made changes, and clearly not supporting some limited configs, thus avoiding the whole Vista Capable fiasco; you may say virtualisation doesn’t help with the second scenario, indeed for that they should also have kept XP in active duty, in parallel to Vista, and have a gradual transition (I mean, come on, if your OS that comes 6 years after the previous one manages to have actual system requirements that exclude some systems shipping at that time, even when not counting netbooks, making the system requirements gap even larger, you might wish to, you know, consider a transition period; and a transition period that’s not an unprepared oh-crap-people-are-complaining-let-XP-live-a-bit-longer scenario). The fact they’re virtualising system N-1 in system N+1 tends to suggest that maybe system N would have benefitted too…
Plus this Virtual XP seems like an afterthought, put afterwards to appease people, or rather, who am I kidding, corporations: on top of that it’s limited to only some SKUs, some if a program breaks under 7, the developer of that program can’t assume everyone will have that Virtual XP safety net, so he can’t rely on it while he fixes/transitions his program to 7.
Seriously, Microsoft has been unable to correctly execute a single transition in the 24 years of Windows. There has been Win16 to Win32, and 14 years after Windows 95, it’s not complete (Win 9x to Win NT doesn’t count as, while impressive, it was an underlying implementation change that didn’t significantly impact the APIs, not a transition, in the sense that third-party software did not have to change; perhaps it should be counted as a transition so good it wasn’t even a transition, but anyway it wasn’t a transition). In the meantime, Apple? Three transitions (68k-ppc, MacOS 9-Mac OS X, ppc-Intel; the latter not being complete yet, but ongoing). While it would be beneficial for everyone if Win64 was more widely used, where is the push from Microsoft for the legacy Win16 and DOS programs (which don’t run in Win64, by design of x86-64 and its long mode) to be rewritten/replaced? Need I remind you how well Microsoft prepared everything with everyone in the industry for there to be good driver support for Vista at launch, especially for 64-bit Vista? Etc, etc.
In a completely different discussion, while it can be a solution (or part of it) virtualisation is hardly a panacea. As was clearly seen with Classic, even with integration à la Unity/Coherence (which Classic had), this virtualised environment is seen like a ghetto: some external hardware can’t be accessed; while there is some interoperability with apps in the main OS, it’s limited; some other stuff (no support for Mac OS X super-long file names; an app crashing inside Classic threatens Classic and all apps running under it) was specific for Classic/Mac OS X, but I’ll bet there will be stuff specific to that Virtual XP as well. Moreover, since the developers of actually maintained applications won’t want them to be in such a ghetto, they will want to update for the current OS, so it’s better for, once in a generation, excising all at once the legacy parts of an OS and then rebuild a modern platform, not for making the platform a moving target with each major release as then you basically don’t have a platform any more. Not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s a far cry from the virtual machine future.
-Not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s a far cry from the virtual machine future.
+Not saying Virtual XP is a bad thing, but it’s a far cry from the virtual machine future.
Microsoft is learning! 
However, as crazy as it may sound it took several years for me to move from 2000 to XP. For the first several years there were no advantages and many disadvantages.
The same was true from XP to Vista, and I am sure it will be true from Vista to … whatever this will be called.
Having the old version available and integrated will make skeptical people like me able to adopt newer software more easily. I think this is a great move. This will make it so that all my older (and much beloved) programs continue to work.
It’s so funny to hear you call XP ancient, and then ridicule it because of how LITTLE resources it uses. Good God. Someone give Jeff an operating system that requires 8GB of RAM so he will shut the hell up.
233 MHz processor
64 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended)
Super VGA (800 x 600) display
ahahahhaaaahahaaaaahaha
you working for ms?
Large enterprises will likely wait and see to find out how policies and configurations are being pushed to that environment. It is one thing to maintain backward compatibility for legacy applications, but if the transition is poorly made (for example, if there are no registry pass-throughs), sysadmins will in effect be managing two, rather than one, OS per desktop, with more headaches and causes for concern.
Beyond management issues though I am thrilled by this; it will free up the Windows platform to move forward.
Hmm, interesting. I wonder will it access the same disks, like the MacOS 9 virtualisation on pre-10.5 MacosX, or if it will behave more like Virtual PC at the moment.
@Scott Beamer
After reading some of the comments here I can’t help but wonder when are people going to stop clutching onto an OS that is almost 10 years old and move on?
Why? What reason do you have for wanting to move to the new OS?
Until there’s a compelling reason, why change? Change for the sake of change isn’t necessarily good.
I see you play EVE-Online… right on brother.
Microsoft’s move to virtualize XP is a move to prevent a repeat of the Vista sales debacle. Most businesses were not willing to move from XP to Vista. Many businesses perceived Vista as a sales gimmick and did not want to incur the cost of upgrades for little or no perceived value to the business. It is difficult to make a business case for replacing proven technology with what amounts to eye-candy. This is not the only reason for the dearth of Vista sales but it is a big one. This is why Microsoft is virtualizing XP and not Vista. It is trying to convince businesses that they will not have to replace their existing software inventories to upgrade.
In looking at the screen shots that Jeff linked to, it seam that XP mode is a full XP with XP security. If that is the case, that leads to two questions:
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Will Microsoft continue to support XP in the virtual environment after the XP termination date?
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How well is the guest / host isolation for XP under Windows 7? Will a compromise of the virtual XP allow the compromise of the Windows 7 Host?
This genius move will only drive more customers to Apple, simply because OS X offers far better integration of any Windows version (32 and 64 bit Windows versions) with OS X.
Bigger issue here is that virtualizing XP at this stage of Windows 7 development will not free us from all the crappy APIs. Windows 7, let’s face it, is still Windows XP/Vista under the hood. It is not a new (or siginificantly better) OS. I am saying this based on released architectural information about new Windows OSes.
Apple is going multicore in a big way and Microsoft is advertising virtualized XP.
Can the gap between two visions of computing be made bigger than this?
My question is: will this virtualized xp recognize recognize the graphics card, or will it use a crappy 8 MB graphics card, just like the VirtualPC XPs? There are games that doesn’t run in XP and not Vista (and Windows 7), and require more than a 8 MB graphics card to run properly.
They aren’t doing this because of regular people, they are doing this for their corporate customers. The main reason they have to keep postponing the XP kill date is because big companies with large IT divisions are scared to upgrade their PCs, because maybe Vista won’t work with all of their custom applications. Now they can finally say to the corporate guys that XP is dead, buy Windows 7 and you get XP to run.
Robert said it best!!!
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
I feel XP is more of a Zombie or Vampire, or your choice of undead. Microsoft has been trying to kill it for years, but it’s still roaming the world, eating brains… mmm what I meant to say is most large enterprises and companies still use exclusively XP, I’ve yet to see a large company switch to Vista…
Besides XP is a rock solid undead by now, no way it’s going to die before the turn of the decade. Oh and all those little laptops that are all the rage nowadays are better with XP…
anyways you get the point…
Robert on April 26, 2009 09:30 PM
My kids (teenagers) have tonnes of old games that they cling to and love, and play over and over again. You can never tell when some old game will get reinstalled and played all over again. For these games they need XP; virtually all them are known to have issues on Vista.
I haven’t dared give them Vista, but maybe, with this amazing news, they could have Win 7 and install their old games in XP compat mode.
Most of the things you listed there is not Microsoft’s fault…and I suspect #2
Re: Creative, they’re a terrible vendor. They actively refused to implement drivers for anything but their absolute newest cards for Vista. They’ve had effectively four years to do it, and they haven’t bothered. That’s not Microsoft’s fault.
Re: NVidia: Give updating the drivers a shot. I had the same issues with my 8800 GTX until I actually looked at the little notice center that said there were updated drivers. Giving them a try, it went from version 7.28 something to 8.15. My games have been fast and smooth, without crashes, ever since. Again, that’s on nVidia’s shoulders, not MS.
Solidworks…oh baby. Yet another vendor that I wouldn’t trust.
The one I agree with you on is the blue screen on hibernate…there’s a good chance there’s a bug in the beta for that. However, it’s just as likely that your motherboard vendor has some new drivers out there to fix it…if you have a decent supplier for your own parts. (You did build your own PC and got reputable parts, right? 
)
When you write software that uses obscure hooks, incorrect calls, incorrect usage of Win32 tools and methods, when you squeeze another ounce of performance out at the cost of following practices that are laid out in the MSDN, you risk breaking your product. It’s not Microsoft’s fault that people abuse their API. It’s C. C was designed for abuse, on purpose! C has all the speed and readability of a high…er level language, with (most of) the fun hooks and tools that you get with assembly. If you’re not careful, if you don’t understand exactly what’s going on, and if you, as an application developer, don’t very carefully follow the practices that you’re told to follow as a developer, your product will likely break. That’s on YOU, as a developer, NOT Microsoft.
Pre-emptive comment: I don’t work for Microsoft, just develop on their platform. It’s a huge, difficult platform to develop for, and there’s lots that you can do wrong. There’s two ways of dealing with those issues: find and fix them as they appear, or blame Microsoft. Guess which one is the right way to go, and which one is the way the majority of the bad developers choose to go. As far as I’m concerned, a bug is a bug is a bug, and bugs need to be squashed first. Microsoft has done everything they can to make sure that bugs, issues, and other problems in their BETA have been found before release with this new release. If your app doesn’t work in Windows 7, there’s a good chance a bug has been filed about it now, BEFORE Windows 7 releases. If they don’t fix it, after months and months of knowing about the problem, then the developer is the one at fault.
@Mitch: You are absolutely correct. Windows 7 IS slower than XP when playing the games I play. And it’s beta so it’s not even a valid measurement yet.
And anyone that wants to have that original XP PC speed just install the base OS with ZERO updates and it will be blazing. Of course you’ll probably be infected two seconds later…
Does anyone know how this new virtualized XP will intereact with the hardware? Currently the only video card that Virtual PC can simulate is an old S3 Trio 32/64. It only does 2D and can barely handle a screensaver.
@Jason Cohen: Thank you! I’ve been trying to explain that to people and no one seems to get it. If you have ALL OF THE PROJECTS IN YOUR SOLUTION THEN YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE ALL OF THE PROJECTS IN YOUR SOLUTION! If you don’t have the source code add ALL DEPENDENT NON-SYSTEM DLL’S IN AN ASSEMBLY FOLDER!
I hate it when you download some code off the net and the jerk hasn’t bothered to save some external DLL in an assembly directory or worse is linking to multiple mystery meat libraries that you have NO IDEA where or how to get.