"Gene E. Bloch" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:24:59 -0400, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:

On Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:22:22 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote in article ...

Per Bruce Hagen:
You may never need it, but with Pro or higher, you can use XP Mode. It
has
come in handy for me.

Which begs the question that's been in the back of my mind since
first seeing "XP Mode"....

Is "XP Mode" something global - i.e. where one boots up the
system in "XP Mode"?

Or is it on an application-by-application basis where an
application can be started in "XP Mode" while the rest of the sys
is running normally?

It is a VM (virtual machine) that you run inside of Windows 7 that
looks and works almost exactly like running XP natively. Video isn't
as good (no 3d as far as I know), performance is a little lacking, and
hardware is virtualized but otherwise it is just like running XP.

From what I understand, you can also run it on an application-by-
application basis as you describe, but I've not run it that way so I
can't really comment or offer advice.

My understanding is that the application-by-application basis is a
matter of configuring the VM to be invisible except for the application
you are running.

Yes, the VM runs invisible and applications are presented to the host
desktop via an RDP connection to the guest.

As anecdotal evidence(?), when I tried to run an application that way,
the program took nearly as long to start as if I had booted the VM first
and then started the program :-)

Depends on how the VM is configured. Default behavior, when no applications
are running, is to hibernate. So launching an application will include the
time it takes to boot the VM up from hibernation. If you have the system
resources you can configure it to stay running so apps will launch quicker
but it will slow down shutting the host down as it will first have to send a
shutdown\hibernate command to the VM and wait for that to complete before
the host finishes its shutdown process.

I didn't use XP Mode for very long, since it was not a match to my apps,
so I didn't learn very much, sorry.