edmondegan, MCTS, SBSC

We recently had a regular support customer who had bought a new system from us at VeryPC running Windows 7, unfortunately it turned out that they run an old version of autocad which in-turn also utilises the A3 plotter they have in the office which also has only Windows XP drivers.

Typically here would be when a Windows 7 downgrade could come into play but as their new energy efficient system supports hardware virtualization, we decided to give XP Mode a shot.

XP Mode for the uninitiated is a fully licensed version of Windows XP which runs within Windows 7, allowing the installation of legacy software which otherwise wouldn’t run on Vista or 7. The added bonus of XP Mode is that the applications run within their own window directly from the Windows 7 start menu (apps installed in XP Mode appear on the 7 start menu as if they were installed solely on 7) – meaning no need to have a VirtualPC / VMWare Workstation window cluttering up the place.

After we had downloaded the XP Mode files (which was a Windows XP .VHD and a copy of VirtualPC for Windows7), we installed Autocad and were able to connect Autocad to the plotter with no problems at all and no noticeable drop in application use & performance (apart from a slight delay on app startup) from within the virtual machine.

I was really impressed with the solution and so was our customer as otherwise it would have been an reinstall on the system and along with that unacceptable downtime.

Big thumbs up for Windows 7′s XP Mode !

¬¬  Edmond Egan is Technical Services Manager for BothRealities, a managed services company based in Sheffield,UK. He is also a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and part of the Small Business Specialist Community with a passion for Server and Desktop Virtualization and Disaster Recovery.