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Scott Lurndal

writes:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2014 09:59:19 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

| The new or off-lease computer would come with the OS installed, and
| installing virtual XP is litterally a "piece of cake".

You mean Virtual XP mode for Win7? I thought you
meant installing a VM. I don't know anything about
Virtual XP mode, but it seems to require Win7 Pro,
which costs quite a bit more than Win7 Home OEM.
Maybe that's worth it to someone who can't give up
XP but *has to* buy a new machine.

| I've been in the PC business now for 25 years (well, will be 25
| years in August). 256 is inadequate to run anything of consequence on
| XP. 512 will work, but 1024 really wakes it up, particularly if
| running 2 programs at a time. Takes all the load off the hard drive
| (swap file/virtual ram issues). With 256 ram, you WILL wear out the
| hard drive.
|

Virtual XP IS a VM.

A VM (Virtual Machine) is a "container" that appears to software as if it
were running on bare-metal. The "container" usually runs under an
hypervisor (or an existing OS that has hypervisor functionality). Common
hypervisors include VMWare and Xen (Citrix), and both Windows and Linux have hypervisor
functionality using HyperV and KVM (kernel Virtual machine) respectively.

All modern processors (Intel, PowerPC, ARM, Itanium, PARISC, et alia)
have hardware support for virtualization to make virtualization significantly
more efficient than if the processor didn't have the extra support
(often implemented via an additional privilege level, more privileged than
the the operating systems being virtualized (SVM on AMD, VT-X on Intel,
Exception Level 2 on ARMv8)).

Any x86 operating system can be run in a x86 Virtual Machine (VM) including
MsDOS, OS/2, Linux, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, etc.

It comes standard on Win7 Pro, and can be downloaded for free from
Microsoft if you need it on a "lesser" OS.

Personally, I ALWAYS buy Pro, so it's not an issue for me (I need the
network capability of Pro - lesser OS cannot join a domain)
How is it that so many people in a home repair group
suddenly turn out to build computers for a living?

Some of us build very large, very fast, very expensive computers for
a living. Some of us even write hypervisors for a living.