
It's something lots of people here on OSNews have been waiting for. It's something we've talked about, something we've theorised about, and something we've declared as the future for Windows' backwards compatibility - and now it's here, and official. Over a month ago, Microsoft bloggers Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott have been briefed by Microsoft on a technology for Windows 7 called Windows XP Mode. Available as a free download for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate users, it's a fully integrated and licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 in a VirtualPC-based environment, with full "coherence" support. In other words,
it's Microsoft's variant of Apple's Classic environment, and it's coming to Windows 7, for free.
Near-instant update: The
Windows 7 RC will indeed be available publicly on May 5. TechNet/MSDN will get it April 30.
Member since:
2005-11-10
This is what Vista should have been but then I know OS-X wasn't so hot on release either.
Remember when OSX 10.0 came out Apple made it pretty clear that is was Beta software and would be a while before this would be good for production. They didn't try to push people to use it making people think it was great yet by their own admission its half baked.
Apple charged $129 for 10.0 Cheetah but gave Cheetah users a free upgrade to 10.1 Puma. They also gave you a choice between full OS 9 or OS 10 till 10.2 on their PC's.