This is great news for people worried about upgrading from winxp to win7

Very good idea!

Wow, probably the best thing MS has ever done.

I don't know, but xp now is so spread even larger than win 95 in the 90s
for me, i hate vista, cause i'm not interested i themes & transparent vista windows.
so I;m sticking to xp, till they ioffer me something worth the hassle of shifting to windows 7

That's... interesting. It doesn't seem to say much for Microsoft's claims that Windows 7 will be the best version of Windows ever, if they have to offer a 2-versions-old compatibility layer to entice users to upgrade. Still, it's interesting. It might work.

I bet they are hoping it turns into the backwards compatibility thing that Xbox had. Great feature but afte a while people just really didn't use the feature and just stuck with Xbox 360 stuff. This will happen with Win 7, which is good for it.

Thumbs up for this, Will help me to no end in helping my customers transition away from Windows XP! I have installed Virtual PC In Vista with Xp as a default for many customers (Cost is prohibitive though as XP and Vista License needed) so being able to have this integrated into the Windows 7 Professional license is a godsend!

Very interesting move on Microsoft's part. Should help alleviate concerns from folks who didn't switch to Vista, and are hesitant to switch to 7.

Not to mention compatability with devices (read: scanner and printers that will never have Vista drivers, let along W7). This is a pretty good idea, although it underminds the perception that Windows 7 is a quality product, it'll have people asking "Why are they including the legacy (8 years) OS with it? Is the new OS buggy?"

TAKE THAT CREATIVE!!!! now u cant mess up the drivers cause we can just install xp ones!!!

Yea and there is 'prolly DOS in there somewhere too.
Dear Lord we'll never get rid of it! :-)

I'm a Linux user but this is impressive coming from MS. It's an incredibly clever idea that will actually be beneficial to both them AND the consumer.

sound great, can't wait to play with it.

Seems like one innovation that I actually agree with. Good job.

Mac OSX Panther came with backwards compatibility to run OS9 apps through a virtualization feature. You could either boot into OS9, or run it as a background process to use the apps.

Another great windows feature that Mac paved the way for

But seriously. This was a duh. cudos to microsoft with their XP line for making such a nice OS that made a great upgrade to 2000 for the home user. It's a shame that Vista didn't share the roots

I think I'll stick with XP and virtualize Win7

This is idea has the best intentions, but its the dumbest thing in the world.

Microsoft claims...must wait and see.

I've gotten used to XP so much that I really don't want test anything new, XP is the original OS and nothing can beat it's stability, after all it has 8 years of patches and SPs in it, and that is what gives it its stability and reliability, nothing can beat it by a longshot.

wow...this is awesome...is this feature already on the beta versions? cuz i could definitely use this feature to get my chipset and video driver installed properly on my tablet that's running 7068.

Bravissimo Microsoft

Lets just hope that MS keeps up this type of forward-intelligent mindset for future products...

YES, I'm loving Windows 7 already.
Hopefully it's good as they say.

Damn nice idea Microsoft! Now, this will make all the processors equipped with VT worthy of investment.

Unfortunately my E7200 doesn't :\

VERY Good idea. When I deal with business customers, the one thing keeping them from jumping to Vista has been software they use that they licensed at high cost that wouldn't work with Vista. By providing the XPM, they can upgrade to Windows Seven (indeed, they can upgrade at leisure as computers break) without having to worry about those licenses.

I hope Direct3D/OpenGL will be hardware accelerated under the new XP VM (Maybe NVIDIA could come to rescue with some nifty driver tricks). (And DirectSound 3D too for all those EAX lovin gamers out there.)

That would allow the large number of older games that have compatibility/performance issues under Vista to be happily run in Win 7 compromising compat or HDD space.

I do remember seering something somewhere about virtualizing 3d GPUs under VMs... pretty sure t was NVIDIA or VMWare...

Okay, so now I want windows 7 but I was a late adopter of Vista (POST SP1)
and won't buy it unless I can get a low price (upgrade) option. This is a repeat of history for me unfortunately as I was a sucker and purchased Windows ME shortly before the Windows XP release was announced.

This news makes me happy.... Especially considering the fact that my Phenom has the AMD Vitualization thingy. Now the question is, if you're running Windows 7 x64, is the WinXPM running as a 32bit install. One of the problems I've had with some of my semi older games is they will not run on a 64bit OS. Not to mention I'm an unfortunate Soundblaster X-Fi Fatality owner that has no working driver support under vista. Though the Support for Win7 does seem to be better.

If only it were for all mainstream version of 7. Seems like Home users are left out in the cold unless they upgrade to a different spin.

I've been bashing Microsoft for years but damn! Including XP with Win7 in a seamless format is sweet. I think this is my first compliment to the folks in Redmond, WA since the day they started in New Mexico. Now I'm excited about Win 7. Good move.

Will one need to somehow install XP drivers for it to work? Or will Win 7 drivers work when in XP mode?