
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:
2005-07-24
I suspect that Red Hat might be interested in this kind of strategy for their RHEL product. It would add an extra level of confidence for their customers when they upgrade.
In fact, I have a situation right now where I had to *add* an old CentOS 4.x server to run a C/ISAM <-> SQL gateway. We upgraded the old server to 5.x, and everything else was fine... except for this, admittedly clunky, but absolutely key, piece. I might have done things differently if Centos 4.x had been virtualized into CentOS 5.x out of the box.
Just because MS does something does not mean that that something is necessarily a bad idea.