Running XP within 7 consumes more power than XP standalone ?

Will it consume more power within 7 and be slower than XP standalone ?

 

do you mean virtual xp on win 7? if so yes of course it will be slower, your system is trying to run two OS's at once of course...

 

That depends. Sure it will be slower, but HOW MUCH SLOWER is dependent on a couple of factors. If you have the VT bit in the BIOS set and your processor supports hardware virtualization XP will be significantly faster than if VT is not available. And running the guest OS in windowed mode will be slower than running it in fullscreen mode. In full screen mode the host OS will be told to just run only the functions necessary and suspend others that interact with the host OS user, since the host OS user is effectively not there.

I have run XP under Vista on a daily basis for a couple of years now and find that in full screen mode, even without VT, it is pretty quick. (I have no baseline on this hardware for XP standalone, so I can't give a true comparison.)

Gary

 

sorry i didnt mean to sound like i was saying it was heaps slower but as gary said it depends on several factors.

but it will be slower (even if just by a little bit)

 

And you didn't. I just didn't want the OP to think that you were. And more important, I wanted the OP to understand some of the variables that can affect it.

Gary

 

rofl, nice amusing question to start the day with.....

 

So do you have ANYTHING to contribute?

Gary

 

Well, yah. But just in terms of encouraging people to think their questions through and try to understand what they are really asking about and what they really need.

Beyond the hard/solid technical questions, lots of what gets discussed here is clarifying a users real needs and busting through per-conceptions about what is possible. and how things work.

Someone has an excellent sig line that says, more or less, people should concentrate on how to solve a users problem instead of telling them exactly how to run their machines. This needs to be taken a bit further so that for every question asked/answered, an opportunity to teach a bit about the underlying technology and potential best practices so that the people who have questions can eventually start to answer them accurately.

 

Great thoughts, but unfortunately your initial post in this thread did none of them. All you did was belittle the question. No value add in that was there?

Gary

 

Yes, virtual XP within 7.

Ok, it will be a little bit slower , no problem , will it consume just a little more power than XP standalone or will battery life be comparable to XP standalone ?

Since 7 has a bit better battery life than Vista, I guess , running vitual XP will consume a little more power making battery life comparable to Vista..

 

Interesting question. Windows 7 has much more extensive power options than Windows XP. Assuming you're only running XP as a virtual machine, it stands to reason that the power profile that will be followed will be the ones for Windows 7, hence longer battery life (assuming the VM is mostly idle and Windows 7 has longer battery life than native XP). The question here is how much overhead does it have, thus, how much more CPU cycles would it consume? Are the extra CPU cycles enough to put total system power consumption even with or higher than a native XP install? This is all very theoretical. The only way to confirm would be to put it to the test.

As for my experience with virtualization, I haven't really had noticeable slow-down, even without hardware assisted VT. In fact, I'm using Virtual PC 2007 on an Intel D945GCLF2 (945GC+Atom 330) and have two lightly-loaded virtual machines running XAMPP servers. With the VM additions installed, I can't say I noticed any difference in responsiveness, either in windowed mode or fullscreen. Alas, I've never really monitored power consumption when running the VM's, and since it's a desktop build, no doubt, the inefficiency of the power supply might make it difficult to ascertain a difference of 1W or so.

By the way, Windows Virtual PC requires Intel VT-x or AMD-V support. You can install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or other virtualization software, though.

 

Are you sure about that? I was having issues installing Windows Virtual PC(subsequently resolved) and was toying with the idea of just using Virtual PC2007 instead. But the indications, or I should say implications, were that VPC 2007 wouldn't run under Win7. To be clear, I don't know that to be fact, it was my interpretation of what I saw on the Microsoft web site.

Gary

 

It's not supported by Microsoft but it works. I'm currently running a couple of VM's on the following system:

Intel D945GCLF2

• Intel Atom 330
• Intel GMA950
• Kingston 2GB DDR2 800 CL6
• Seagate Momentus 5400.3 250GB
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RC

The virtual machines were created under Windows XP and have VM additions installed. So far I haven't had any problems running them in Windows 7.

I also installed Virtual PC 2007 on my ASUS UL30A with Windows 7 Home Premium x64 RTM but that one complained that

It was basically the same message you get if you're running XP Home or Vista Home Basic/Premium as host. I suspect if I do the Anytime Upgrade and get Professional or Ultimate, though, it'll stop complaining. I still need to create an XP Lite install disc (including hotfixes after SP3) before I create a new VM.

One caveat, you can't have both Windows Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 installed on the same machine.

 

ilovejedd,

Thanks for clarifying that!

Gary

 

virtual XP is included in 7 Pro so no need to install anything extra ?

 

mayb 5w to 10w more depending on the proc generation

 

Based on what? Or is that a guess? Not saying you are wrong, just asking how you know.

Gary

 

Highly unlikely, my lappy consumes now about 10 W, that would mean 50 to 100 % more...

 

+1. A virtual machine at mostly idle is not likely to generate such an increase. If it's running at 100% CPU load, though, yeah sure, but that's pretty much the same as running any processor-intensive program (e.g. encoding a video using x264, etc).

5~10W increase in power consumption on a desktop is negligible, but on a laptop, it's a very big deal, specially if you don't have any power outlets nearby or you've forgotten to bring the charger.