Windows 7 ult with xp emulator or xp on hard diffrent hard drive?

[reconviperone1]

right now I have windows xp, on one disc, and windows 7 rc on another, i was thingking of purchasing ultimate, so i could just have 2 drives instead of three(xp,win 7, storage), but so far the reviews have not been kind, anyone with firsthand knowlege?

 

[sminlal]

The XP emulator works fine and avoids having to reboot just to run an XP application. But it won't help you with hardware that doesn't have Win 7 drivers, and I understand that printers can be difficult to set up for XP applications.

 

[JonathanDeane]

I have not had time to play with the emulation in 7 does it run games ?

Thats about the only application I have found any problems with in 7 Not a huge loss and the games I speak of are ancient to say the least.

My personal feeling on the matter is that you should partition your drive if you want to keep one drive with an actual copy of XP on it so you can have a data partition and the OS partition. I say XP instead of 7 is that 7 requires so much of a drive already.

Or you could go with my solution and say ahhh *beep* it and just run 7 and what ever does not work with it gets replaced with something newer...

Edit: On reading Sminlal's post again I believe that the XP emulator is not directly accessing the hardware.... soooo DirectX is pretty much out the window if my theory is correct.

ReEdit: I suppose its a good thing that XP does not have total access, or else people would run into the same issues as before with all the spyware and all that jazz.

 

[Snow_Patrol]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 7 Ultimate have XP Mode as well? Regardless, you could always run XP using Virtual Machine 2007 for your old games and applications. Then you need only to install 7 on the one drive and keep your other drive for storage, and you wont have any problems whatsoever. I currently use Vista Enterprise in a virtual machine on XP, and it runs perfectly without much lag to speak of. I wouldn't bother with emulators, because at some point in time you'll run into something that requires a proper component of XP. Using virtual machines, you can even run your old DOS games in Windows 95 if you so wish, and you could fool around with Linux without any hassles.

 

[sminlal]

I wouldn't bother with emulators, because at some point in time you'll run into something that requires a proper component of XP.

I used the term "emulator" in my post because that's what the OP chose for the thread title, but in fact I was referring to the Virtual PC version that is integrated into Windows 7 (although it's a separate download).

Windows 7 also has a "compatibility mode" which does NOT use a virtual machine, but rather allows you to set characteristics of the programs runtime environment (API calls, etc.) to more closely match XP.

If you have a program that doesn't run under Windows 7, you should try using compatibility mode first, and if that doesn't work then you can try running the program in an XP virtual machine. If that doesn't work either (as might be the case if you need special drivers) then dual-boot is your option of last resort, IMHO.