Designed for Small and Medium Businesses   Windows XP Mode was designed for the small and medium business user who doesn’t have a lot of resources to spend on IT or on revamping important software. Windows XP Mode extends the lifecycle of many older Windows XP applications to continue providing business value. Once you install these applications directly in your Windows XP Mode environment, they will be published to your Windows 7 desktop. With just one click, the business user can run many Windows XP applications from a Windows 7 desktop just as if it were a Windows 7 application. There’s no need to re-train the user, or to re-learn the application.

Video

New Windows Virtual PC Features

Here are some of the exciting new Windows Virtual PC features that make it easy
to use, and to run many of your older Windows XP applications from your Windows 7
desktop:

• Seamless Applications—publish and launch applications installed on
  Windows XP Mode directly from the Windows 7 desktop, as if they were installed
  on the Windows 7 host itself.
• Folder Integration between host and guest—access your Windows 7 Known
  Folders, such as My Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Music, Video, from inside the
  Windows XP Mode environment.
• Clipboard Sharing—cut and paste between your Windows 7 host and any
  virtual machine.
• Printer Redirection—print directly to your attached printer from your seamless
  application or virtual machine.
• USB Support—users can access USB devices attached to the host directly from
  Windows XP Mode. These devices include Printers and Scanners, Flash Memory/
  Sticks and External Hard Drives, Digital Cameras, and more.

Windows 7 System Requirements

• 1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1GB RAM (32-bit) / 2GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher Driver

Windows XP Mode with Windows Virtual PC Requirements

• Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate or Windows 7 Enterprise
• Additional 1GB of RAM
• Additional 15GB of available disk space
• Processor capable of hardware virtualization with AMD-V or Intel VT turned on

Links

Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC

Download Microsoft Windows XP Mode

The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:

It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.

    Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.

To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.

    Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.

Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems.

Here’s a screenshot of a copy of a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V system running in a virtual machine on top of the system it was made from:

Links

Download Disk2vhd (704 KB)

Run Disk2vhd now from Live.Sysinternals.com

Features of Virtual PC for Microsoft Windows 7:

• USB support and redirection – connect peripherals such as flash drives and digital cameras, and print from the guest to host OS printers
• Seamless application publishing and launching – run Windows XP Mode applications directly from the Windows 7 desktop
• Support for multithreading – run multiple virtual machines concurrently, each in its own thread for improved stability and performance
• Smart card redirection – use smart cards connected to the host
• Integration with Windows Explorer – manage all VMs from a single Explorer folder (%USER%\Virtual Machines)

The virtual machine is called Microsoft Windows XP Mode (XPM) for Microsoft Windows 7 and is – as of today – available for download in Release Candidate (RC) state.

Links:

Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows 7

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

To setup Microsoft Virtual PC / Microsoft Windows XP Mode:

Download either the 32bit or  64bit (x64) Version of Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows 7 using the link above

For the 32bit version the filename is Windows6.1-KB958559-x86.msu for the 64bit/x64 version it’s Windows6.1-KB958559-x64.msu

In any case, the knowledge base entry for the release candidate (RC) of Microsoft Virtual PC for Microsoft Windows 7 is KB958559.

When installed, the system wants to reboot.

After rebooting, go check the entries in your Start Menu. There must be a new Folder called Windows Virtual PC.

Click on Windows XP Mode

This popup should appear

Windows_XP_Mode_Download

Download the the file. it’s approx. 500mb

Then execute the downloaded exe (WindowsXPMode_en-us.exe)
This Process will extract the Virtual Machine Disk of Microsoft Windows XP Mode VM to %ProgramFiles%\Windows XP Mode
The Filename of the VHD is Windows XP Mode base.vhd

Now start the Microsoft Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 again using the start menu, clicking on Windows XP Mode

A wizard will open:

EULA

Windows_XP_Mode_Setup_1

Define Username/Password for the Windows XP Mode Virtual Machine

Windows_XP_Mode_Setup_2

Define the automatic protection settings

Windows_XP_Mode_Setup_3

Wait for about 5 minutes for the Microsoft Windows XP Mode to complete setup (copies the base VHD to your %userprofile%)

Windows_XP_Mode_Setup_4

you’re done!

Windows_XP_Mode_Setup_5

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