Windows 7 - now with the secret ingredient XP added!
According to OSNews ( your source for all the latest operating system news ) Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions will come with what Microsoft is calling XP Mode, which promises to give you absolute compatibility with Windows XP for any applications that don't play nice with Windows 7. This will be accomplished by making available a fully integrated and licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 in a VirtualPC-based environment. Currently, VirtualPC is a free download from Microsoft -- what's new here is the inclusion of a legal copy of XP. This sounds like an interesting approach to the thorny issue Microsoft faces every time they introduce some major changes to underlying operating system architecture -- how to support the old stuff out there without grunging up the new OS? One concern I'd have about this approach is this: how much overhead will running XP in a virtualized environment generate? I've played with running XP this way and face it, your poor c...