Not many users have problems running software on Windows 7 as the operating system seems to be compatible with most available programs. Microsoft has nevertheless added the so called Windows XP Mode to the operating system that provides access to a virtual Windows XP system that integrates smoothly into the Windows 7 operating system.
The reason for this is to give their users an option to use the Windows XP mode to run software that is not running on Windows 7. Windows XP Mode required a processor with hardware virtualization support when it was introduced which meant that some computer users were not able to make use of it.
Users can find out if their PC is supporting hardware virtualization by downloading Microsoft’s Hardware Assisted Virtualization Tool.
Microsoft announced that they had removed the hardware virtualization requirement of Windows XP Mode two days ago and that they would make a patch available so that ever Windows 7 user with the right edition could make use of Windows XP Mode in the operating system.
The patches have now been made available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7. Once installed they remove the requirement of hardware virtualization which gets rid of error messages like “Unable to start Windows Virtual PC because hardware-assisted virtualization is disabled” and “Cannot start Windows Virtual PC Host Process. Check the System event log for more details” which users experienced previously.
A genuine validation check is performed before the download becomes available.
Update for Windows 7 (KB977206)
Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB977206)
Install this update to remove the prerequisites required to run Windows Virtual PC and XP mode
Have you been making use of the Windows XP Mode in Windows 7? If so how was your experience?
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Windows XP Mode experience in one word: SUCKS!
I tried it to run old games. Does not work. I had to do what I always did, starting from Windows XP – use VMWare.
This is great!… will try this out.
Hope they release a similar patch for Hyper-V too!