Many of you have asked me what my thoughts of Windows 7 are now that it has been released, and I’ve had time to really use it. You may remember from a previous post that I used the RC (Release Candidate) version of Windows 7 for about 6 months prior to it’s release, but as with all Alphas, Betas, and Release Candidates, sometimes things change. The biggest of those changes for Windows 7 was the addition of “XP Mode”. For those of you who aren’t familiar with XP Mode, it is described by Microsoft as a special “mode” to allow you to run applications that are not compatible with Windows 7 but are compatible with XP. What it really is.. a virtual installation of Windows XP running in Microsoft Virtual PC.
I’ve never cared at all for Microsoft Virtual PC, my primary complaint being performance. I have a preference for VMWare, or the new up and coming Virtualbox. However, the implementation of XP Mode is pretty slick. You basically startup the “XP Mode” through a start menu link, it will boot-up Windows XP in a window complete with the background, green Start button and all. From there you can install the applications that need to run in Windows XP… nothing out of the ordinary here from VMWare or any other virtual pc application. After installing the application, you close the XP Mode window – it will hibernate the XP installation. There will now be new icons under All Programs on the Start Menu, under “Windows Virtual PC” / “Windows XP Mode Applications”, for the application that you installed. You can also copy this link to the desktop or pin it to the new Windows 7 task bar.
To start your XP Mode application from this point you just click on the corresponding link for that application. There will be a small popup with a progress bar says “Starting virtual application”. This is the point to where it brings your virtual box out of hibernation, generally it only takes a few seconds (5-10 seconds). Your XP Mode application will launch in it’s own Window, which makes it look like a normally installed application. The XP virtual installation never shows (Desktop or Start Menu), and you treat the virtual application just like you do with any native app – you can move it around, maximize, minimize, or hit the red x to close it.
In terms of telling the virtual application apart from the native, the main difference comes in the way that you access your files. If, for example, you have Microsoft Word running in XP Mode (shouldn’t be any reason to ever do that, but for the example we’ll assume you have) and you need to open a document stored on your Windows 7 drive, you may have to access it different than with a normal application. You are in luck you put all of your documents in the “My Documents” folder. XP Mode will automatically link your My Documents folder in the XP Mode app to that of your Windows 7 My Documents folder, it will do the same for your Desktop. However, if you store your files in “C:myfiles” for example… the “C:” drive in the XP Mode application is that of the virtual container, not your Windows 7 c: drive. However, they do automatically map any drive you have on your Windows 7 computer to the XP Mode application automatically. For example, I have 5 network drives mapped on my Windows 7 machine, so in the XP Mode application I have 7 additional drives showing up in the “open “dialog box. The drives show up labeled like “c drive on ltech-1″, “d drive on ltech-1″, “e drive on ltech-1″ and so on.
So to access a file on my local C drive inside of the XP Mode application I would select the drive “c drive on ltech-1″ from the drop down in the open dialog box, and then browse to the file location. Very easy, but for new users or the “non-techies” out there, it may be a learning process.
Conclusion
So, with the exception of XP Mode that is described above, there really isn’t any big changes that I have seen from the Release Candidate of Windows 7. All of the applications that I used before still work, with the exception of one. When I was on the release candidate I was in 32-bit, I installed Windows 7 RTM in 64-bit, so I did have one application that could not run in 64-bit. It could have ran in 32-bit, but of course I would have then been limited to 4Gb of RAM. On my current machine, I can install up to 24Gb of RAM, so I wanted to be able to break that 4Gb barrier.
In terms of performance, it’s a world of difference between Windows 7 and Vista. If you are on Vista and your machine is “bogged” down or slow, an upgrade to Windows 7 may just help that because of the lower memory footprint and better optimized code.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Tags: Operating System, upgrade, Windows 7