For those of us that are using Windows 7 and have a Professional or higher edition, Microsoft has kindly included a Windows XP Mode to download and install applications that don’t fully work in Windows 7. While I admit, I’ve use the XP Mode for some things, for most things, I haven’t had to touch it, because of the fact that the mass majority of my stuff works in Windows 7 fine, plus the fact that Windows 7′s XP Mode is just a glorified virtual machine with Windows XP pre-installed. But aside from that, it does work very well at what it does. Recently, it was updated to not require hardware virtualization so I downloaded it and tried it out on my laptop, which is running enough RAM to allow for XP mode for be pretty fast… or so I thought.
The default background and setup before I started poking around.
Instead, when I finally got it up and loaded, it was rather slow. And when I say slow, I mean it managed to make Windows Vista look surprisingly fast on this laptop. (For those that are wondering how fast it really was, the average boot for my computer, optimized, was 2 minutes. Windows 7 takes about 45 seconds. Not top of the line, but no slouch either.) So to say the least, I wasn’t too thrilled with it taking it’s own sweet time. Rather then just grin and bear with it, considering it was a freebie from Microsoft, I decided to do some poking around with it, as well as looking up some more advanced tips, and found a major time saving tip for those of us that use the Virtual XP Mode.
The major thing you must know is that the Virtual XP in the articles I’ve been reading, claim, and have been backed up by my testing in that it only uses 512 MB of RAM, no matter how much or how little RAM you have in your computer. Since I’m got 3 Gigs in my computer, I thought it might be wiser to provide about a third of my RAM, or 1 Gig to the Virtual Machine. So to change this, we have to go to:
C:\Users\Hell Noire\Virtual Machines
and right click on the Virtual Machine. Since I am only using the one operating system in a VM, I only had one, but if you’re using more then one, be sure to choose the proper one, which should be named Windows XP Mode.vmcx and select the Settings option. Under that, there should be a Memory tab/setting for you to modify to allow for more RAM to be used.
Now, I’m assuming your username isn’t ‘Hell Noire’, and if that’s the case, change that to suit your username. But once I modified it to run at 1 Gig of RAM, it was actually pretty quick and booted and shut down quicker.
The one thing I’d like to add is if you are using Virtual XP Mode, you might want to look into using a free antivirus, like AVG, Avira, Panda Cloud, or Avast for protecting your virtual machine from viruses as well. Overall, I still haven’t had much use or need to use XP Mode, but for those of us that are still wondering how to use MS Office 2003 and Final Fantasy 7 on the new systems, XP Mode’s one of the best ways how.
And now for the winners of the IPHider One Year giveaway! Our winners are:
- SHAN
- Stok Guru
- Jason Wright
- Jim
- Aasmee Agarwal
I’ve sent IPHider your email addresses you’ve provided and your free license should arrive sometime before the end of the weekend!