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From: Puddin' Man on 25 Mar 2010 23:18

I build a little desktop system for personal use every 3-4 years. The one I'm
running will be 4 in June, and it's getting "long in the tooth".

I don't game. I've got my eye on a Clarkdale i5-660 and an H57 board. I
can likely sort out most of the hardware issues, but ... is anyone running,
say, a Clarkdale *without* an external-to-Clarkdale video device? How does it
look??

I've been running Win2k/Office2k on a multi-boot system for near 10 years.

No problem for, say, $150 for an OEM license for XP or Win7, but I dunno
which. I can't afford to license Office, but I got tons of old O2k (Outlook)
Email archives that I'd hate to give up.

Given my druthers, I'd continue to run multi-boot on 2 HD's (to facilitate
image backup) with 2 OS's (W2k and either XP or Win7).

Should I go with XP? Or Win7? I lack experience with both, so start-up
isn't necessarily a factor.

Q1: Is Win7 in the future likely to be what XP has been to the past (generally
viable, something that most everyone can live with)??

Q2: Any experience with OpenOffice?

Any suggestions about software for such a system would be much appreciated.
For instance, (free) backup/imaging program for XP or Win7?

Puddin'

"Law Without Equity Is No Law At All. It Is A Form Of Jungle Rule."

From: Paul on 27 Mar 2010 19:30
Puddin' Man wrote:

>
> So you've scouted popular video cards (ATI, Nvidia, etc) and found that
> no W2k or XP/W2k-functioning drivers were available?
>
> Intel is integrating GPU into CPU cores (i.e. Clarkdale), and Intel no longer
> supports W2k video drivers?

This is my experience - that if you're getting *any* newly designed video
stuff, there won't be a Win2K driver (even though, in my opinion, such
a driver would be virtually identical to a WinXP driver). The drivers are for WinXP
and up. You're welcome to research this yourself to be sure. Download the graphics driver
first and check. With Intel, you could download the ZIP version, then use the 7-ZIP
program to look through the files. I look for folders with the right kind of
names, and look inside .INF files, to see mention of which OS the thing is
for. Sometimes the README.TXT tells you the details as well.

Things like LAN drivers seem to be different. For your average new Ethernet chip,
you can find drivers for a lot of OSes. There is no snobbery with LAN chips, not
like with graphics.

It was one of the reasons I bought a copy of WinXP, so I'd have at least one
OS I could continue to use for games. Since I still occasionally dual boot
to Win2K, I decided the video card I picked up, would support both. The card
I picked, is about the best I could find. (There are better cards, but
they're not in production any more. Maybe I could find a card outside
North America, but I wanted something I could get in a couple days. The one
I bought, I just happened to notice when looking on that site for
something else. That card design is at least four years old. It has
about double the performance of the AGP card it replaced, but it is
still pretty slow.)

When I make the statement above about Win2K, that doesn't take into account
any cases where someone has hacked a driver to run under Win2K. You never
know, it might be a simple thing to do. In my case, I wanted a product where
it "says on the tin", that it supports Win2K.

I keep an old PCI video card here as well, but it was so bad on the new system,
I had to pull it. It was causing all the other PCI stuff to stutter, much
worse than some other chipsets I've used. For example, the USB mouse is bridged
to the same PCI bus as that video card, and the mouse cursor would occasionally
go all over the place. The HDaudio sound also seems to be tied into that bus
as well. It would break up, if there was heavy PCI bus usage. I haven't tried
my WinTV PCI capture card yet, but I don't expect the results to be very good.

>
> Which Intel chipset(s) are you running? Performance hit with "vanilla IDE"?
>

This board has an X48 and ICH9R.

If you check some benchmark articles, desktop style usage can actually
be slower with AHCI. So vanilla IDE isn't so bad after all. AHCI is better,
if there are multiple things trying to reach the disk at the same time,
and there is a queue building of outstanding disk requests. But if the
queue depth is one, like on a desktop where you're working in one program,
the non-AHCI option may be the better match. The advantage of AHCI is it
supports hot swap. The NCQ (native command queuing) of AHCI, makes more sense
in a server setup. In the case of Intel, the AHCI driver also allows
a smooth upgrade to RAID later.

>
> Is VPC2007 still available? I tried to make some sense of:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC
>
> and failed. :-(

One of the developers who works on VPC2007 keeps a blog. In this example,
he has installed a copy of Win7 inside a VPC2007 session, while at the same
time, Win7 is the host OS. This shows that VPC2007 SP1 revision, works in
Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/01/13/windows-7-on-virtual-pc-on-windows-7.aspx

Scroll to the bottom here. There is a version here, for a 32 bit host OS and
for a 64 bit host OS. Any guest OS you install, should be 32 bit as far as
I know.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en

VPC does like to install shims, when it comes to hardware. I've noticed
a change in the behavior of the floppy drive, after VPC was installed.
And when I recently changed to the new motherboard, the networking inside
VPC stopped working. The cure is supposed to be to uninstall it and
reinstall it again, so it can install its shim setup for the new hardware.

VPC consists of "supported" OSes and "unsupported" OSes. If you install
Win2K, that is "supported". Desktop integration should be perfect. You can
copy and paste, drag and drop files and so on. Linux is not supported.
I run Linux, but need to use tricks to get files back and forth. There is
a VPC additions package for some of the commercial versions of Linux, but
I would not expect them to work with just any Linux distro you happened to try.

Once VPC2007 is installed, you start the console, then define a new OS.
If you "start" the OS, the environment has a virtual hard drive, it has
the ability to use the CDROM drive, the floppy drive, networking, and so
on. The software emulates really old hardware, so the installer for the new OS
is fooled into thinking it is running on a 10 year old motherboard.

You don't have to "install" anything either. When I insert a Linux LiveCD
on the machine, I go to the OS window that has just started to boot. From the
menu, I tell VPC2007, to "capture" the current CD in the drive. Then,
VPC2007 considers that CD, to be an item in the boot order. The Linux
CD will then start to boot. In a couple minutes, I'll be looking at a
"Ubuntu desktop".

Now, since all the software runs off the CD, you cannot very well just
rip the CD out of the drive in mid session. If you "save" the current
session, the contents of RAM are preserved. But when that OS session is
run again, you'd have to make sure the CD with the software is available.
If you do an actual install (use the install option in Ubuntu), then
the virtual hard drive file for that OS, contains the gigabytes of
software. And you no longer need to worry about whether the CD is
there, and whether it is captured or not.

That is not much of a summary to help you, but might give you some idea
how it works. VPC2007 is a software emulator, with the ability to
bridge between resources in the host OS, and the guest. When inside the
guest OS, a program writes to "sector 7368" of its virtual hard drive,
there is a single file on the host system, which contains an image
of the virtual disk. That file will have added to it, enough information to
capture the contents of the newly written "Sector 7368". The VHD
file on the host system, expands as required. There is an upper
limit to the virtual disk size, but you'll be warned about that, when you
define the OS.

The virtual environment allows you to have multiple virtual disks.
For example, I've actually set up a dual boot environment, within
the same VPC2007 guest window. I had three virtual disk images.
One disk image for each of the dual boot OSes. One disk with
user data on it. One of the OSes in that case, was Win7, and I used
the boot manager withing Win7, to select which virtual disk to boot
off of. I was testing a failure condition someone had on a real PC,
and trying to reproduce it in a virtual environment. So the emulated
world is quite capable, if you can figure out how to do stuff.

The only thing missing on my PC, is my processor doesn't
support VT-x. Apparently, VPC2007 supports real hardware
virtualization. I've been unable to test that, since the
E4700 Core2 processor doesn't support it. As a consequence,
I'm missing the "whole experience" here. I don't know what
additional features I get, if my processor supports
Vanterpool or Pacifica. The "WinXP mode" of some versions
of Windows 7, relies on hardware virtualization (I cannot use
WinXP mode from Windows 7 here, because of that). VPC2007
(which does not include an OS with it, like "WinXP mode" does),
treats VT-x as an option. I can still run VPC2007 on my
machine, but whatever VT-x buys me, is unavailable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization

(My E4700 is a "have-not" in the list here.)

http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?familyID=26547

>
> ntfs is the same for W2k and XP? Thanks for mentioning this, I'd not
> heard of it. Not certain I understand it fully yet.

Wikipedia makes mention of various versions of NTFS software. But they also
mention that the most recent feature improvements, are above the file system,
rather than being within the file system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs

"Windows Vista introduced Transactional NTFS, NTFS symbolic links,
partition shrinking and self-healing functionality though these
features owe more to additional functionality of the operating system
than the file system itself."

That article doesn't contain enough detail, as to what differences
exist between NTFS on Win2K and WinXP.

>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anandtech per Google:
> What happened when Google visited this site?
>
> Of the 19 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s)
> resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user
> consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-03-27, and the
> last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-03-27.
>
> Malicious software includes 3 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an
> average of 1 new process(es) on the target machine.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------

I use Anandtech every day. It's where I get warnings about stuff, like
the plan to change all the disk drives to 4K sectors.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/anandtech.com

(I didn't even know Anandtech have downloads.)

Firefox has its own site warning feature (it gets database updates every day),
and Anandtech doesn't trigger it. Very few sites I visit, are ever stopped by
Firefox. The last one that comes to mind, was bioscentral.com, which had
been hacked and had malware on it. It was broken for some time, and it was
in the Firefox database. That site has since been fixed, and I can visit
it again.

Even legit sites can be hacked and have malware. I got malware from the msi.com.tw
motherboard manufacturer site. Asus was also hosting a nasty one day for about
five hours, before they fixed it. Fortunately, only people entering by the
main page (asus.com) got nailed, and I use bookmarks deeper in the site, so
I missed that one. The hackers did some kind of redirect using the top page,
and didn't bother messing up the whole server.

>
> I myself drew Win32.FraudTool.AntivirusSoft and a registry entry. Mucks
> about, tells you you're infected, offers their product for $.
>
> Much Thanks,
> P
>
> "Law Without Equity Is No Law At All. It Is A Form Of Jungle Rule."
>

On the Asrock motherboard I had previous to my upgrade (a board that runs
a Core2 processor), I was able to install Win98. Just to prove it could be
done. Win98 only uses one core, but the Device Manager was just as clean
as the WinXP install on the same machine. On my new motherboard, I wouldn't
bother trying that, as I expect the results would be worse. The Device
Manager would likely be a mess, and I might be staring at a 640x480 res
screen in 16 colors. It is a lot harder to find PCI Express video cards
with Win98 support. There are some, but I wouldn't waste the money on them.
(They're early first generation PCI Express and are only suitable as museum
pieces.)

Paul
From: Puddin' Man on 28 Mar 2010 00:34
On 27 Mar 2010 00:32:27 GMT, Postman Pat <Pat(a)hello.com> wrote:

>Puddin - I also use Windows 2K as my default and also boot into XP Pro,
>Vista and now Windows 7 when required (I support my own software so need
>to be able to run different systems).

You use maybe BCDEDIT for the Win7 boot mngr? It constitutes
"another serious PITA" like the registry editors? :-)

>Win 7 seems really good and interestingly actually runs on old hardware
>surprisingly well - one of the boxes I have here is running a Sempron
>2200 with 1 GB and I have to say it's quite usable - of course it depends
>what you are doing with your PC.
>
>Real problem for me is finding replacement software for all the things I
>use on my main PC.

Under W2k?

>Office XP obviously runs fine but a lot of other
>things don't !
>
>Registry Mechanic 6
>Alcohol 120%
>Nero
>Outlook Express (which is what I use !)
>Fineprint
>EZ CD Extractor
>Illustrator (who would have thought it !)
>
>and several other things all refuse to run so will need
>upgrading/replacing.

Even in the Win7 (XP) compatibility mode (or whatever they call it)?

>I managed to get Windows Mail running on the Win7 install but I am not as
>confident of it as I was of Outlook Express.
>
>Anyhow, my $0.02 worth.

Interesting to hear!

Thx,
P

"Law Without Equity Is No Law At All. It Is A Form Of Jungle Rule."

"Law Without Equity Is No Law At All. It Is A Form Of Jungle Rule."

From: Puddin' Man on 28 Mar 2010 19:57
On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:30:06 -0400, Paul <nospam(a)needed.com> wrote:

>Puddin' Man wrote:
>
>>
>> So you've scouted popular video cards (ATI, Nvidia, etc) and found that
>> no W2k or XP/W2k-functioning drivers were available?
>>
>> Intel is integrating GPU into CPU cores (i.e. Clarkdale), and Intel no longer
>> supports W2k video drivers?
>
>This is my experience - that if you're getting *any* newly designed video
>stuff, there won't be a Win2K driver (even though, in my opinion, such
>a driver would be virtually identical to a WinXP driver). The drivers are for WinXP
>and up. You're welcome to research this yourself to be sure. Download the graphics driver
>first and check. With Intel, you could download the ZIP version, then use the 7-ZIP
>program to look through the files. I look for folders with the right kind of
>names, and look inside .INF files, to see mention of which OS the thing is
>for. Sometimes the README.TXT tells you the details as well.
>
>Things like LAN drivers seem to be different. For your average new Ethernet chip,
>you can find drivers for a lot of OSes. There is no snobbery with LAN chips, not
>like with graphics.
>
>It was one of the reasons I bought a copy of WinXP, so I'd have at least one
>OS I could continue to use for games. Since I still occasionally dual boot
>to Win2K, I decided the video card I picked up, would support both. The card
>I picked, is about the best I could find. (There are better cards, but
>they're not in production any more. Maybe I could find a card outside
>North America, but I wanted something I could get in a couple days. The one
>I bought, I just happened to notice when looking on that site for
>something else. That card design is at least four years old. It has
>about double the performance of the AGP card it replaced, but it is
>still pretty slow.)

What resolution are you running on host? On guest?

>When I make the statement above about Win2K, that doesn't take into account
>any cases where someone has hacked a driver to run under Win2K. You never
>know, it might be a simple thing to do. In my case, I wanted a product where
>it "says on the tin", that it supports Win2K.

I would need pretty much the same.

>I keep an old PCI video card here as well, but it was so bad on the new system,
>I had to pull it. It was causing all the other PCI stuff to stutter, much
>worse than some other chipsets I've used. For example, the USB mouse is bridged
>to the same PCI bus as that video card, and the mouse cursor would occasionally
>go all over the place. The HDaudio sound also seems to be tied into that bus
>as well. It would break up, if there was heavy PCI bus usage. I haven't tried
>my WinTV PCI capture card yet, but I don't expect the results to be very good.

I guess they don't build the boards PCI for video anymore.

>>
>> Which Intel chipset(s) are you running? Performance hit with "vanilla IDE"?
>>
>
>This board has an X48 and ICH9R.
>
>If you check some benchmark articles, desktop style usage can actually
>be slower with AHCI. So vanilla IDE isn't so bad after all. AHCI is better,
>if there are multiple things trying to reach the disk at the same time,
>and there is a queue building of outstanding disk requests. But if the
>queue depth is one, like on a desktop where you're working in one program,
>the non-AHCI option may be the better match. The advantage of AHCI is it
>supports hot swap. The NCQ (native command queuing) of AHCI, makes more sense
>in a server setup. In the case of Intel, the AHCI driver also allows
>a smooth upgrade to RAID later.

Interesting.

>>
>> Is VPC2007 still available? I tried to make some sense of:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC
>>
>> and failed. :-(
>
>One of the developers who works on VPC2007 keeps a blog. In this example,
>he has installed a copy of Win7 inside a VPC2007 session, while at the same
>time, Win7 is the host OS. This shows that VPC2007 SP1 revision, works in
>Windows 7.
>
>http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/01/13/windows-7-on-virtual-pc-on-windows-7.aspx
>
>Scroll to the bottom here. There is a version here, for a 32 bit host OS and
>for a 64 bit host OS. Any guest OS you install, should be 32 bit as far as
>I know.
>
>http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en

Check.

>VPC does like to install shims, when it comes to hardware. I've noticed
>a change in the behavior of the floppy drive, after VPC was installed.
>And when I recently changed to the new motherboard, the networking inside
>VPC stopped working. The cure is supposed to be to uninstall it and
>reinstall it again, so it can install its shim setup for the new hardware.

Hmmmmmmm. What happens to permanent guests when you uninstall?

>VPC consists of "supported" OSes and "unsupported" OSes. If you install
>Win2K, that is "supported". Desktop integration should be perfect. You can
>copy and paste, drag and drop files and so on. Linux is not supported.
>I run Linux, but need to use tricks to get files back and forth. There is
>a VPC additions package for some of the commercial versions of Linux, but
>I would not expect them to work with just any Linux distro you happened to try.
>
>Once VPC2007 is installed, you start the console, then define a new OS.
>If you "start" the OS, the environment has a virtual hard drive, it has
>the ability to use the CDROM drive, the floppy drive, networking, and so
>on. The software emulates really old hardware, so the installer for the new OS
>is fooled into thinking it is running on a 10 year old motherboard.

So I've heard. Some VMware modules use Intel BX440, which I ran native
for years.

Say a few words about performance of, say, a supported guest? W2k?

>You don't have to "install" anything either. When I insert a Linux LiveCD
>on the machine, I go to the OS window that has just started to boot. From the
>menu, I tell VPC2007, to "capture" the current CD in the drive. Then,
>VPC2007 considers that CD, to be an item in the boot order. The Linux
>CD will then start to boot. In a couple minutes, I'll be looking at a
>"Ubuntu desktop".
>
>Now, since all the software runs off the CD, you cannot very well just
>rip the CD out of the drive in mid session. If you "save" the current
>session, the contents of RAM are preserved. But when that OS session is
>run again, you'd have to make sure the CD with the software is available.
>If you do an actual install (use the install option in Ubuntu), then
>the virtual hard drive file for that OS, contains the gigabytes of
>software. And you no longer need to worry about whether the CD is
>there, and whether it is captured or not.

And your Ubuntu would become a permanent guest. No?

>That is not much of a summary to help you, but might give you some idea
>how it works. VPC2007 is a software emulator, with the ability to
>bridge between resources in the host OS, and the guest. When inside the
>guest OS, a program writes to "sector 7368" of its virtual hard drive,
>there is a single file on the host system, which contains an image
>of the virtual disk. That file will have added to it, enough information to
>capture the contents of the newly written "Sector 7368". The VHD
>file on the host system, expands as required. There is an upper
>limit to the virtual disk size, but you'll be warned about that, when you
>define the OS.
>
>The virtual environment allows you to have multiple virtual disks.
>For example, I've actually set up a dual boot environment, within
>the same VPC2007 guest window. I had three virtual disk images.
>One disk image for each of the dual boot OSes. One disk with
>user data on it. One of the OSes in that case, was Win7, and I used
>the boot manager withing Win7, to select which virtual disk to boot
>off of. I was testing a failure condition someone had on a real PC,
>and trying to reproduce it in a virtual environment. So the emulated
>world is quite capable, if you can figure out how to do stuff.

You run BCDEDIT or Easy BCDEDIT to config the Win7 boot mngr?

>The only thing missing on my PC, is my processor doesn't
>support VT-x. Apparently, VPC2007 supports real hardware
>virtualization. I've been unable to test that, since the
>E4700 Core2 processor doesn't support it. As a consequence,
>I'm missing the "whole experience" here. I don't know what
>additional features I get, if my processor supports
>Vanterpool or Pacifica. The "WinXP mode" of some versions
>of Windows 7, relies on hardware virtualization (I cannot use
>WinXP mode from Windows 7 here, because of that).

I just happened to run across something relating to this on
comp.sys.intel. Appended at end of msg.

>VPC2007
>(which does not include an OS with it, like "WinXP mode" does),
>treats VT-x as an option. I can still run VPC2007 on my
>machine, but whatever VT-x buys me, is unavailable.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
>
>(My E4700 is a "have-not" in the list here.)
>
>http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?familyID=26547
>
>>
>> ntfs is the same for W2k and XP? Thanks for mentioning this, I'd not
>> heard of it. Not certain I understand it fully yet.
>
>Wikipedia makes mention of various versions of NTFS software. But they also
>mention that the most recent feature improvements, are above the file system,
>rather than being within the file system.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs
>
> "Windows Vista introduced Transactional NTFS, NTFS symbolic links,
> partition shrinking and self-healing functionality though these
> features owe more to additional functionality of the operating system
> than the file system itself."
>
>That article doesn't contain enough detail, as to what differences
>exist between NTFS on Win2K and WinXP.

Suffice to say that diff's exist.

>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Anandtech per Google:
>> What happened when Google visited this site?
>>
>> Of the 19 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s)
>> resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user
>> consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-03-27, and the
>> last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-03-27.
>>
>> Malicious software includes 3 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an
>> average of 1 new process(es) on the target machine.
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>I use Anandtech every day. It's where I get warnings about stuff, like
>the plan to change all the disk drives to 4K sectors.

I've browsed anandtech occasionally for maybe 14 years. No problems I
knew about.

>http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/anandtech.com
>
>(I didn't even know Anandtech have downloads.)

I dunno they do.

>Firefox has its own site warning feature (it gets database updates every day),
>and Anandtech doesn't trigger it. Very few sites I visit, are ever stopped by
>Firefox. The last one that comes to mind, was bioscentral.com, which had
>been hacked and had malware on it. It was broken for some time, and it was
>in the Firefox database. That site has since been fixed, and I can visit
>it again.
>
>Even legit sites can be hacked and have malware. ...

Quite so.

I run Firefox all day/every day, but still have IE6 as default browser
(at least 1 of my bank sites requires it).

I jumped to Anandtech with IE6 and got a msg like "Windows has detected what may be a
malicious attack ...".

>>
>> I myself drew Win32.FraudTool.AntivirusSoft and a registry entry. Mucks
>> about, tells you you're infected, offers their product for $.

It was an AdAware scan that found Win32.FraudTool.

Now my IE6, always semi-crippled, yields only "The page cannot be displayed"
from known-good sites.

Where did it come from? I dunno. I was running AVG 8, AdAware, a Spybot
module, Sunbelt PF.

You are a kind, kind fella to take the time to explain VPC2007, etc.
I hate to hit you with so many questions, but ...

If you were replicating your software on your hardware, how would it load?
First Win7 (32 bit)? Then VPC2007? Then any guest you desired (within
certain bounds)?

How many and which permanent guests are you running?

How does multi-threading, SMP work/not-work with VPC2007 guests?

How does security work when you put a guest on the net.

How much physical memory are you running?

I have some vague notion of what a bare-metal hypervisor is. This is
different. Hardware prices being what they now are, I should theoretically
be able to resource/config a virtual system to run, say, one-or-more Win7
images, one-or-more W2k images, etc. I need to get a handle on the
practicality of such.

Much Thanks,
P


On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:34:56 -0400, Intel Guy <Intel(a)Guy.com> wrote:

>Intel has produced marketing documents that outright lie about which
>chips have VT functionality. I'm speaking specifically about some Q8x00
>quad-core processors.
>
>It has resulted in a lot of consumer confusion and grief, and now we see
>that Microsoft has to deal with it - as follows:
>
>---------------------------
>
>Microsoft is making a slew of virtualization-related announcements on
>March 18 � including one that will be welcome by customers who've been
>stymied by the chip-level virtualization requirements for running
>Windows 7 in XP Mode.
>
>Effective immediately, Windows XP Mode no longer requires hardware
>virtualization technology, Microsoft officials said today. XP Mode is a
>feature of Windows 7 Professional or higher that allows companies to run
>XP applications that are incompatible with Windows 7 in a virtual
>environment.
>
>Until today, XP Mode would only work on PCs that included CPUs that
>supported chip-level virtualization. Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft
>General Manager of Windows Commercial Product Management admitted during
>a phone interview this week that users were confused as to which PCs
>offered this technology. Some PCs that claimed to didn't support XP
>Mode. To enable more users to take advantage of XP Mode, Microsoft found
>a way to eliminate the need to have virtualization turned on at the BIOS
>level. The company is releasing an updated version of XP Mode today to
>users and OEMs for download, she said.

"Law Without Equity Is No Law At All. It Is A Form Of Jungle Rule."

From: Paul on 28 Mar 2010 20:44
Puddin' Man wrote:

>
> What resolution are you running on host? On guest?
>

The host OS is WinXP, and runs 1280x1024 on a 17" monitor.

You start Virtual PC, and the console opens, with a list of your
installed (or CD based) OSes.

I start my copy of Win2K in there. A 1024x768 or 1152x908 window
opens, with what looks like a Win2K desktop in there. The OS plays
a part in what guest resolutions are supported. The video interface
emulated in the virtual environment, is an unaccelerated S3 chip of
some sort. Some OSes have trouble selecting various resolutions or
bit depths as a result. I have a number of Linux CDs, that aren't
particularly happy in there. In one of those Linux OSes, I had to
do an "init 2" and bring up the OS in text mode, fix X-windows, and
then I was able to make a larger window with the OS. (This is all
part of the fun, minor hacks to make stuff work.) Installing a
Windows OS is the least traumatic option. Others can require more work.

Some of my Linux OSes die in the virtual environment, because the Linux
OS actually starts querying the environment, to see if it is virtual
or not :-) And due to bugs in the code for that particular feature,
the OS crashes early in the boot process. I have a suspicion if my
E4700 supported virtualization, those cases might not have crashed.

Virtual PC can also mount an ISO9660 file, so you don't need to burn
CDs for everything. I generally make CDs for any OS where I expect to
boot the physical machine with that OS. The "capture" operation in VPC2007,
allows you to capture a 700MB ISO9660 file, as if it was a physical
CD. It allows you to test a Linux distro, without wasting a CD on it.

>> When I make the statement above about Win2K, that doesn't take into account
>> any cases where someone has hacked a driver to run under Win2K. You never
>> know, it might be a simple thing to do. In my case, I wanted a product where
>> it "says on the tin", that it supports Win2K.
>
> I would need pretty much the same.

If you download the driver for your prospective integrated graphics, you should
be able to find out fairly quickly if it supports Win2K.

>
> I guess they don't build the boards PCI for video anymore.
>

At this point, I'm not really sure why it is so twitchy. I've had other Intel
chipsets, where the PCI bus was a champ, and played nice. I don't know why
my current board seems detuned.

>
>> VPC does like to install shims, when it comes to hardware. I've noticed
>> a change in the behavior of the floppy drive, after VPC was installed.
>> And when I recently changed to the new motherboard, the networking inside
>> VPC stopped working. The cure is supposed to be to uninstall it and
>> reinstall it again, so it can install its shim setup for the new hardware.
>
> Hmmmmmmm. What happens to permanent guests when you uninstall?

The uninstall and reinstall, isn't *supposed* to upset the setup of the
environment. I'll have to test that, and soon. I'll probably back
up C; before testing, just to be safe. (Yes, Windows has System Restore,
and yes, I've used it, but I also like to make backup copies of C:, if
I have any doubts about the outcome of any experiments I might try.)

>
> So I've heard. Some VMware modules use Intel BX440, which I ran native
> for years.
>
> Say a few words about performance of, say, a supported guest? W2k?

The characteristics of the real processor, determine the level of performance.
The emulated hardware in the environment, is mainly there to make
installers happy. The emulated environments, don't try to emulate
any crappy performance the 10 year old hardware might have had.

For example, if a guest OS attempts to access control and data locations
on a disk controller interface, the emulator understands what the guest
OS is really doing, is attempting to read or write. The emulator reads
what the guest OS just did, and converts that operation into an equivalent
in the "real world". For example, updating the VHD file with the
newly written sector. And that operation will run at the bandwidth
of the real hard drive. The emulation is only there, to make
the guest OS "comfortable", not to give you the same crappy performance
you got from your 440BX :-)

>
> And your Ubuntu would become a permanent guest. No?
>

You can remove OSes from the VPC2007 console list of OSes. You can delete
the set of files that represent the state of that OS.

In fact, for my Win2K setup, I keep a set of "fresh install" files
in a separate folder. Maybe that occupies 1GB of storage. The current
Win2K files might occupy 3GB or 4GB of space. If, for any reason,
I want to "start over again", I just delete the 3GB or 4GB of current
files, and then make a copy of the empty Win2K setup and make that
copy the current setup. Say I got a virus in the Win2K emulated
environment. By erasing the current set of files, and copying over
my "golden" set of empty files, I can start over without reinstalling
from a CD. As long as the space occupied by your guest OS isn't that
big, you can easily do "backup and restore" by working with the set of
files that represents the guest machine state.

>
> You run BCDEDIT or Easy BCDEDIT to config the Win7 boot mngr?
>

I think I used EasyBCD to configure the Win7 boot manager.
I was using the downloaded trial version of Win7 at the time,
which is just about expired now. So I won't be able to use
that in the future. This is not a bought copy of Win7, just
the trial they released last year. It was a 2GB or so download.

> I hate to hit you with so many questions, but ...
>
> If you were replicating your software on your hardware, how would it load?
> First Win7 (32 bit)? Then VPC2007? Then any guest you desired (within
> certain bounds)?

I boot WinXP 32 bit version as the host. I start VPC2007. I capture the
2GB ISO9660 file with the Win7 installer in it. I install Win7 as a guest OS.
I set up a second guest OS window and install Win2K. That gives me a seccond virtual
disk with Win2K on it. I shut down the Win2K window. I go to the VPC2007 console,
go to the Win7 session and "add" the Win2K virtual hard drive to the Win7 session.
I use EasyBSD to tell Win7 there is a second OS present. I added a third virtual hard
drive to the Win7 session, to emulate the situation where one of the
OSes was corrupting something. I was not able to reproduce the original
corruption problem by doing so. Which proved to me, that you should
be able to dual boot a couple OSes like that on a real computer, without
expecting a shared data disk to get screwed up. Someone had reported that
their Win7 setup was corrupting something, and I wanted to test it.

>
> How many and which permanent guests are you running?

The only permanent ones now, are Win2K and Knoppix 6.2. I have a
whole host of "car wrecks". For most of the rest of them,
I can't tell you right off hand if they're running, busted,
I was in the middle of something or whatever. Suffice to say,
I could delete a large percentage of that in 10 minutes, and
have just the two guests mentioned above in the menu. Oh yeah,
I also have Win98 in there, but I can't remember the last
time I ran that.

>
> How does multi-threading, SMP work/not-work with VPC2007 guests?

Since my VT-x doesn't work, I'm going to have to dodge that question.
My guest OSes report "one core". Maybe that would change if my processor
supported VT-x. I'm not really sure what I'm missing :-)

>
> How does security work when you put a guest on the net.

Nothing on a PC is bulletproof. No matter what technology you use,
it is only a matter of time until somebody breaks it. I've read
enough accounts of exploitation techniques, to conclude that nothing
is really that safe.

>
> How much physical memory are you running?
>
> I have some vague notion of what a bare-metal hypervisor is. This is
> different. Hardware prices being what they now are, I should theoretically
> be able to resource/config a virtual system to run, say, one-or-more Win7
> images, one-or-more W2k images, etc. I need to get a handle on the
> practicality of such.
>
> Much Thanks,
> P

I run a small system. Only 2GB of RAM. I generally run one guest at a time.
A big guest gets 1GB, a small guest gets 512MB. The 2GB limit came
from the limits of my previous motherboard, and I haven't bothered
to install the other RAM I've got. I haven't had a project lately
that needed it.

>
> On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:34:56 -0400, Intel Guy <Intel(a)Guy.com> wrote:
> Microsoft found a way to eliminate the need to have virtualization turned
> on at the BIOS level. The company is releasing an updated version of XP Mode
> today to users and OEMs for download, she said.

Thanks for that. I didn't know they changed it. At the time it was announced
that WinXP mode would only work with a VT-x capable processor, I never
read any reasoning as to why that was so. You would think the code base
for WinXP mode, must share something of the VPC2007 concepts. There might
still be some behavioral differences between the two cases though
(with VT-x or without).

Paul
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