Win7 XP Mode

[SimpleSi]

I didn't realise Mr MS had been clever and lets you install legacy apps in XP mode VM and then just run the app itself directly from the host desktop

 

Very Nice

 

Si

[FN-GM]

Add its free

[Guest TheLibrarian]

I've not managed to get any of the applications to auto-publish yet.

 

Saying that I've not tried very hard.

 

Also it's only for W7 Pro and above.

[chazzy2501]

i can run ie6 and 9 side by side!.....but why!

[SYNACK]

It is good for those must have but terrible apps however it is still slow like the OS9 virtual environment was on the first OSX macs as it has to fire up a whole OS first to run the app. After it is running it suspends the VM but it still needs to boot it each reboot. The USB passthrough works alright but does not auto reassosiate devices which caused issues when we were trying to use XP mode to run some really rubbish Chinese IWB software (Genius has got to be the most oxymoronic brand in the world).

 

Overall it is still way better to get it running in the 7 OS even if you have fast machines.

[mac_shinobi]

What is IE 9 and GPU Acceleration like for everyone else - tried on a work machine and it sucked. In a VM I tried it and it ran fine, not sure whats going on

[jerryeight]

xp mode hmm is it able to install other os with windows 7's xp mode is or is it only xp

[SYNACK]

What is IE 9 and GPU Acceleration like for everyone else - tried on a work machine and it sucked. In a VM I tried it and it ran fine, not sure whats going on

 

Works fine here, you just need a decent GPU, you can switch it back to CPU rendering in advanced options if you want.

 

xp mode hmm is it able to install other os with windows 7's xp mode is or is it only xp

 

You can use the free VirtualPC stuff to do that if you want to.

[mac_shinobi]

Works fine here, you just need a decent GPU, you can switch it back to CPU rendering in advanced options if you want.

 

what is the minimum spec gpu we are talking about here ?

[sted]

xp mode hmm is it able to install other os with windows 7's xp mode is or is it only xp

its xp only basically its a preconfigured windows xp vhd and a version of virtual pc that is system integrated so when you run an "xp" app it looks like its running on win7

[Arthur]

what is the minimum spec gpu we are talking about here?

You need a graphics card which supports DirectX 10.1. Basically a Radeon HD 38xx, GeForce 2xx or Intel HD Graphics 2000/3000 (or newer). Use GPU-Z to check if you're not sure.

 

IIRC, there are several hotfixes from Microsoft which are meant to improve IE9's performance too.

[SYNACK]

As above, you can force it using tricks like this Force Enable GPU Hardware Acceleration Graphics Rendering on Old GPU in IE9 « My Digital Life but it may or may not make for better performance as only some of the acceleration will be avalible through ahrdware with the rest being badly emulated which could actually cause it to be slower.

 

DirectX 10.1 still goes back a fair way especially with AMD/ATI GPUs so it still benifits alot of people. It is probably using the foundation of the DirectCompute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia APIs for rendering which means that the same power is reasonably easy to implement for other types of software and CPU offloading as well.

[Arthur]

It is probably using the foundation of the DirectCompute APIs for rendering

IE9 uses Direct2D and DirectWrite...

 

The way that Microsoft has decided to achieve this is to use Direct2D for all of IE9's rendering. Direct2D is a 2D vector graphics API that's layed on top of Direct3D, and Direct3D is, of course, fully hardware accelerated. Direct2D is in many ways a pretty good match for HTML, CSS, and SVG rendering; unlike Windows' old graphics API, GDI, Direct2D is vector-based (so allows for easy, high-quality scaling and animation), but unlike OpenGL or Direct3D, it offers a simple programmatic interface that's tailored towards 2D graphics, without the complexity that 3D entails.

 

Similarly, for text, Microsoft is using DirectWrite. Again, the technology is high-performance, hardware-accelerated, and it integrates cleanly with Direct2D. (Source)