Comments on: Windows 7 to have an 'XP mode'
Microsoft is planning to use virtualization to allow Windows 7 to easily run applications designed for Windows XP, according to CNET sources and an enthusiast site.
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During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft.
Beyond Binary is a look at how technology is changing our lives and the people behind all that life-changing stuff, with an extra emphasis on that which emanates from Redmond, Wash.
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I would like to see you back up your claims instead of just repeating the anti-Microsoft talking points ad-nauseum.
I remember moving from NT 4 to Win2k to XP... very few compatibility problems. Move from XP to Vista and the nightmare begins.
As for the 'anti-microsoft' rants about Windows 7 being nothing more than a Vista Service pack
http://www.pcworld.com/article/153624/under_the_hood_windows_7_is_vistas_twin.html
What I'd really like to see is an Office 2003 mode for Office 2007. Office 2007 inflicted an entirely new and unnecessary user interface (with precious little increase in actual user functionality) that provides the ongoing opportunity to play "Now where did they hide that function?"
And I used to be frustrated with the Detroit 3 for their practice of planned obscelecence.
Do not confuse this with emulation. That is altogether another complication. Virtualization was born with the 80286, but the engineers didn't think the process through correctly - which is why the CPU had to be reset to get it OUT of PROTECTED MODE,
Of course, this entails the mess of the meticulous keeping track of how the registers were loaded in real or protected mode. That 286 mistake is what killed it. The fix was in the 80386 along with the additional instructions needed to make it go back and forth from real to protected (virtual) mode properly.
Virtualization is the ability to have multiple sessions running at the same time on a single CPU core - independently of each other.. Special instructions were added to make this possible. The special REQUIREMENT of the software that it be RE-ENTRANT. Even the BIOS had to change to make this happen.
Then there is the video viewing problem that had to be dealt with, along with hardware devices that had EXCLUSIVE access that belonged to the virtual process that had a "lock" on it.
The processor had to be put in PROTECTED MODE to make virtualization happen. Then there was a special time slicing DOS program that was capable of running 4-6 things at the same time, but only one virtual process had the screen at one time and the user had to choose which virtual process they wanted in the foreground on the screen at any one time via the F1 - F6 function keys..As long as you had enough EXTENDED memory, it worked quite well.
DOS 7 in XP has a lot of VAX/VMS elements and commands in it. You will find that you will be able to do a LOT more in DOS 7 than the XP GUI will ever let you do. This is why people don't want anything else but XP. DOS still does what it's supposed to do. It's the very foundation XP is built on. Now it's FULLY re-entrant with no hiccups. HIMEM.SYS and DOUBLESPACE.SYS are still there. Dig into your DOS 7 session and into C:\Windows\System32 and look at the DOS .EXE and .COM files. ..BAT files can still be written and they work as usual, but have many more features. They are still there from DOS 6.22. This is why I will NEVER switch to Vista.
If Win 7 doesn't have DOS in it or XP virtualization, another company will arise and finally put the nail in the coffin for MSFT's hefty 2,500 program SINGLE CPU catalog. Multi-CPU has been around since the 1970's. Intel had working prototypes of multiple-CPU's as early as 1984. They've been behind the multi-CPU 8-ball for 25 years now. Enough stalling.
Intel also had it's own O/S called iRMX-386 which was full multi-user, multi-tasking. Before that, we had NDS-II O/S which ran the servers on 8086 CPUs. That's all time-slicing. It was the 80386 that had BOTH the ability to time-slice OR run virtual sessions (with restraints).
It took MSFT and many hardware vendors a good long time to figure out how to do virtualization properly. They had to master PROTECTED MODE to made it happen. EVERYTHING had to be written in protected mode AND RE-ENTRANT to make virtualization work right.
As long as the x86 CPU has enough horsepower and memory, vitrual sessions can be spawned and put to sleep when a device is needed but not ready. This has to be carefully controlled by the removable/fixed media serial device hex string number that has to be present on all media to prevent overwriting the wrong media.
Many don't remember the evolutions of DOS that led up to lay down the foundation for vitrualization. Then MSFT hired the VAX/VMS engineers to give it what we see in XP that lends itself to time-slicing AND virtualization. Each virtual session is capable of time-slicing as well within it's own virtual environment. Then there's backwards compatibility with XP Pro that Vista doesn't have.
In order to make it all work well, the text environment had to be converted to scalable graphics. That was the last wall that needed to fall in order to see all the vitual processes running on the one physical or multiple screens. It was quite a 20 year evolution of motherboard hardware and MSFT software to make it happen.
Win 7 has a very high bar to reach - XP virtualization, backwards compatibility, DOS capability, running 16 bit DOS and Windows programs from the earlier era, and multiple-CPU. Too many good programs have been bought and dumped by MSFT with no satisfactory replacement?. How long is this going to go on? I have 5 systems with various O/S and programs that do a better job than those do today.
Virtualization was there all along in the 80386 CPU and almost every single CPU since then. The x86 protected mode architecture hasn't changed. Just added to and everything else had to change to make vitualization happen.
M$ OS-Roughly $400
Virus Protection-$50
Hardware Upgrade Cost- lets say $350 for Motherboard with processor and RAM, asuming you use on-board everything
Total- $800
Linux OS- $0
Virus Protection- None needed, impervious to attacks
Hardware Upgrade- None needed, 32-bit Linux OS's can run on near everything.
Total Cost-$0