Win 7 and XP emulation

Do you know if the professional editions of Windows 7 64 bit emulate xp 32 bit, 64 bit, or both?

Thanks!

 

32bit only afaik.

 

i didnt bother to try microsoft's, but i personally prefer vmware workstation (paid) or sun's virtualbox (free)

 

Also please do keep in mind that 7 does have compatibility modes for running executables. Incidentally, I have Windows 7 Pro (x64) and I was also wondering the same thing about XP emulation!

 

xp "emulation" is a virtual pc with windows xp 32bit in it, and some fancy shmancy to make it look integrated to win7, nothing else.

but as an ordinary user you should not have the need to use it for apps normally, ever, at all. so far i have not found one app that i didn't got to run on vista, and all of those will run on win7. and about all xp64 specific apps that exist (woah, lets start counting fingers ) will run on vista64 and win7-64 with ease.

so in short, forget about the virtual machine, it's mostly a nice marketing gimmick for the companies that say "look, we need 100% xp compatibility" and then microsoft can now reply "look, we now have 100% xp compatibility".

but as you get around 99.9999% (+- a 9 or two ) without virtualisation on the os level anyways, all will be fine

especially for 64bit specific stuff.


but even then, if the need arises, you can for sure install any 32bit or 64bit os in a virtual machine f.e. in virtualbox. it's free and does run 64bit guest oses.

 

^ similar to vmware's 'unity' mode and virtualbox's seamless windows

 

jup, but a bit more integrated right out of the box. quite nice, but nothing ground breaking. and it's not like such technology didn't even exist from microsoft itself. for corporations, there where virtualisation solutions that even work over network, or let you never see the xp in the back, etc. quite fun stuff existing. virtual xp for win7 is just a huge marketing effect for something that exists in various forms (and got used where needed) since a long time.

 

But in this way, virtual XP lets you run applications in a sense, natively, so that it will save all files and whatnot to the real os, and not to a virtual hd. Virtual XP certainly isn't to "test" programs, per se, as one might do in a vm environment.

 

The simplest solution is often the best one. Occam's Razor...