Final Release of Windows XP Mode

Hey Paul, I enjoyed your podcast last week with Alex Lindsey. I daresay you click better with him than you do with Leo. And...I too love cilantro. But they say some people lack a genetic thingamadoodle that allows them to enjoy it.

No early release for MSDN/Technet subscribers?

I don't think this is going to have as big an impact as they hope. Most of the machines in my organization that would need the XP mode do not have processors that support it. I am guessing most enterprises are in a similar situation.

Hey, I didn't post twice - stupid website.

teemark, the point of XP Mode is to enable corporations to upgrade their computers and software with confidence that they're going to be able to take advantage of Windows 7 features without affecting compatibility of their essential productivity applications.

@teenmark: RobertC is right!

Could never try it as my comp doesn't have processor virtualization.

The extra overhead of this feature makes it a "if you have no other choice" option. I could see it being used to finish a Windows 7 migration, only if 1 or two departments had an app that needed to use this. If it was needed on a large scale I bet they would just hold off on Windows 7 at most places.

I wonder how many PCs that are currently running XP Enterprise can easily be upgraded to Windows 7 and then have legacy apps run in a virtual machine? It confounds me, but I don't think there are too many PCs of this ilk. Am I wrong?

I actually had felt that Alex L. was quite out of the loop on topics, rushed the show along (it lacked it's natural flow) and was quite dry... Maybe I'm just used to Leo, however the show was a little painful to listen to.

I read that part 4 of the neverending Zune review. It's laughable. Really, no one should be using anything that requires points to purchase anything. Thurrott of course glosses that over in the second paragraph. And the toughest he gets with Microsoft is gentle chiding like 'c'mon guys' and 'lame'. Nothing like kid gloves. Can't bring himself to swing the snark-o-matic at Microsoft I suppose. But Paul really loses his edge with reviewing the following separately: Zune Marketplace 
Zune Social 
Zune Pass 
Zune.net 
 That's ridiculous. That's just Microsoft pitching blindly at the wall hoping something sticks. That's how they do that junk, it's totally counterintuitive to how people want content. Why not just make it simple, why do I have to remember 4 different Zune aspects to get the experience? That'll flunk out of the market, seriously, who's going to use that junk? Microsoft employees and Paul's tortured inner family.

Yes the new Intel 6 and AMD 6 cores will be interesting, so i3's are not to have virtualization i5's are quads without HT i7's are quads with HT i9's are Hex's with HT AMDs is two separate lines Sempron: Single Cores Castillio: Phenom II x2 has L3 cache Heka: Phenom II x3 has L3 cache Deneb: Phenom II x4 has L3 cache Then the Athlon II line Athlon x2 no l3 cache Athlon x3 no l3 cache Athlon x4 no l3 cache But hey a quad for under $100 is pretty good Go competition between Intel and AMD

Alex and the other Macbreak guys are very fair, you just have to listen for a while to hear it. I heard Alex state once that Leopard was the least stable OS he'd used, although he was talking about running it on a G5 tower. They make fun of MS but most of us do, the true Mac fanboys never criticize Apple and that doesn't apply to Macbreak Weekly crowd.

"i9's are Hex's with HT" There hasn't been anything officially said about whether or not the i9's will have HT, but the PM said that Intel is committed to offering HT again, I'm guessing because of pressure from many-core processor technologies that NVIDIA is going to offer to compete with Larrabee.

"On the Zune: Paul fails to note that you can now rent music on the iPod via Rhapsody. How about that, an app that duplicates the Zune pass. Oh, wait, it has 8 million songs to the Zune's 5 million. And the iPod already has Pandora for free." Yeah, it's bizarre that Paul continues to ignore that. The Zune pass might be the best reason to buy a Zune, but it's completely negated by the Rhapsody offering, given the feature set of the iPod Touch. So for the uninformed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjGzWS9avmQ

@lketchum Don't bother. You're dealing with people who hate this site and Paul so much that they think: MacBreak (unlike WinSupersite) is neutral because one time a person on there said something bad about an obsolete Apple product It's unfair to compare two products without including 3rd party add-ons for Apple products while only counting what comes in the Microsoft box Criticism of Microsoft products is actually praise if it is "constructive" And that's just in the last few postings. It's as hopeless a case as trying to tell a Glen Beck fan or Linbaugh "dittohead" that Fox News isn't "Fair and Balanced" as the rest of the English speaking world uses those words.

lketchum Reading the posts in this thread insisting that Paul is hopelessly biased and MacBreak Weekly is oh, so neutral I'm reminded of a guy I knew back in college. He was a Trotskyite Communist but insisted that he was a moderate when it came to politics. He considered Socialists to be right-wingers indistinguishable from Republicans but considered the Stalinists to be to the left of him so he was, by his eyes, a moderate. It all depends, I guess, on where you put that middle bar. With the Mac people here, their bar is set where moderate is "praise anything Apple currently makes, condemn anything Microsoft ever made BUT you may have, on rare occaisions, criticized an out of production Apple product as long as you clearly state the new version fixes the problem you're mentioning"

lketchum Well, if you don't practice safe computing... Perhaps you should look into a Panasonic Toughbook (http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/laptop-computers.asp) if this coffee expulsion problem continues - or at least skip the cream and sugar.

rr0de "Leo is and the gang on Macbreak weekly are totally fair." And I think we know where you set your middle bar now.

"How about a Windows 7 mode for XP." Won't work, sorry. The new virtualization stuff requires some new-fangled low-level stuff in Windows 7 that isn't even possible in Windows XP, let alone Vista. If you want to run Windows 7 in Windows XP, I'd suggest Virtual PC 2007 SP1 (with whatever the KB update is to support XP SP3). It is still supported, even if it's not the current version. For free VM tools, I'd certainly recommend that over VirtualBox, which has hideous virtual network support (PXE booting off a WDS server doesn't even work properly on it). Having the VM Additions installed will help with slow performance, but having hardware VT also helps give it that extra boost, although it isn't required. I've tested performance on Virtual PC 2007 on a system with hardware VT and the results peg it at roughly 80% of the speed of the host (ie. averaging 80% of the processing and disk speed compared to what the guest OS would run like if it were installed directly on hardware instead), which isn't that bad considering the hardware is emulated in software. The new version runs a fair bit faster, has the USB support and app presentation virtualization, but both do their job well and without costing anything. .... XP Mode is another thing that Microsoft has to get in gear with and offer OEM preinstallation help for. They STILL HAVE NOT released an OPK to system builders for preinstallation of Windows 7. I have to resort to using Windows Vista preinstallation docs for entering in support information, in conjunction with the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK - the corporate deployment software) and figuring out which instructions apply to me, a system builder, as opposed to a company that's deploying the software for their own use. Of course, there are no system builder packs available in the channel yet because Microsoft hasn't sent them to replication yet (it's still at least a week away just for that). System builders won't be able to release computers early at the current rate. I can expect that people will receive their Windows 7 Upgrade Option packs in the second week of November - the currently estimated ship date - before distributors get any stock of OEMSB packs here in Canada. I'm not holding out any hope that they'll release the OPK for download on the OEMSB site until after they start shipping the 3, 10, and 30 packs that ship with it on disc.

O’Reilly se une a Microsoft Press : Interesante jugada, O’Reilly se vuelve distribuidor de MS Press y