On 12/04/2012 13:42, Mike Barnes wrote:
John :
On 12/04/2012 08:39, Clive Page wrote:
On 10/04/2012 18:22, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Only COMPILED programs may not copy. Data is - just data. I mean I copy
those freely between a 32bit XP virtual machine and a 64 bit Linux..

Indeed. My experience is as follows.

[snip]

be dead ends. There is a Win XP mode in Windows 7 but it can't be used
in Win7 Home Premium; you have to pay Microsoft an extortionate fee to
upgrade it. Eventually I switched to using Thunderbird for news reading

A few have mentioned XP compatibility mode, so some comments are
probably worthwhile.

Its true that you need Pro (or better) to use this out of the box.

However, XP mode is in reality a complete virtual machine running a
real copy of WinXP. There is nothing to stop you using any other
virtual PC hypervisor (including Microsoft's own Virtual PC) and
installing your own real copy of XP on that.

However the confusion is added to, if you go to MS' web page for
Virtual PC, where it will tell you you are not eligible to run XP mode
on Win 7 Home for example. While this is true, its misleading, since
its referring to the bundled XP mode, and not talking about installing
Virtual PC and your own XP, which is kind of what you expect the web
page about Virtual PC would be all about!

Running Virtual PC on Win 7 Home *is* a supported platform. However the
difference is that with XP mode in Win 7 pro, it automatically includes
the Win XP license required to run XP in this way. If you have the Home
version (or Basic etc), you will need a separate fully licensed version
of XP to install under Virtual PC to make it work.

That's all useful stuff, thanks.

I've no personal experience but I've heard of some difficulties with the
apparently simple Virtual Machine approach. AIUI the virtual machine
does not automatically get access to all the resources on the host PC.

You need to chose which ones it gets by default when you configure it.
Once running it can also see network shared resources just like any
other PC. So in some cases you could for example give it access to a
drive that the host machine has already shared, and to it, it looks like
a native drive. Alternatively, it can share it itself (even when its the
virtual machines host that is doing the sharing!)

So in short, its not trivial to configure, and if you can run software
natively without needing to jump through these hoops, then usually so
much the better. However if there is something that you really must run
that can't hack the native environment, its an option.

So you won't see your network drives, installed printers, etc, in the
applications running in the VM. I'd hope that you can install them in
the VM but even so it seems a bit of a faff.



--
Cheers,

John.

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