XP mode? You may need a new PC

By Sam Varghese
Saturday, 09 May 2009 04:52

Opinion and Analysis

It's been my experience that when Microsoft announces something, one always has to read the fine print. That hasn't changed in the 20 years since I bought my first PC.

Hence I was not surprised to discover that like many other things promised by Microsoft in the past, the XP mode which has been touted as a feature of Windows 7 has a number of "ifs" attached to it.

If you have an Intel processor in your PC it should have support for virtualisation - what Intel denotes by the letters VT. And if your processor is from AMD, then it needs to support the corresponding technology.

One first needs to check, using these utilities from Intel and AMD, whether the processor in question has this support.

The PC I use for testing software is just two years old and when I ran the AMD utility, what came up is this: "This system is not compatible with Hyper-V. This utility detected that a necessary BIOS patch is not installed. Please contact your system vendor to determine whether a BIOS upgrade is available."

And so, I vended my way to the Gigabyte website to check if there was a BIOS update for the mainboard. Alas, there is none.

But no fear, that leaves a user with several options - buy a new PC which has a processor that supports either of these technologies. No money? Tough luck.

Else, rewrite every Windows application you use so that they run on Windows 7. Oh, you don't have the source to modify? Tough luck.

Or, recreate all your data using applications that run on Windows 7. Don't have the time? Tough luck.

After all, this new operating system is all about users. And their computing needs.

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