Windows 7 is a great Operating System. It is fast, Stable, Secure and much more pleasing to the eyes than previous Windows Versions. I am not a great fan Microsoft Products, But Windows 7 is a bit of different story. I installed Windows 7 beta months ago just to see what Microsoft is up to, Since than I’ve been using it without much problems. Most of the drivers installed automatically and few left were installed automatically when I connected to the System to the Internet, Windows 7 installed in comparatively less time and everything went smoothly. There are many other features that would like to describe, but in this post I will be focusing on Virtual PC add on for the Windows 7 to run Windows XP inside the Windows 7 box.

After clean installing Windows 7, I wondered if it was possible to install XP as well in the same PC in dual boot mode. Dual booting is possible, but like in previous situation, It is required to clean install XP first than install the Windows 7 in a separate drive. If you wish to dual boot XP OR Vista with Windows 7 then you can get detailed help from this page: http://lifehacker.com/5126781/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-with-xp-or-vista

Anyway, as I had to do random weird things and didn’t wanted to spend time and get bored while installing XP and Windows 7 again, I decided to use Virtual PC solution. Microsoft is providing beta(now RC) version of Windows Virtual PC with Windows XP Mode add-on. Actually Microsoft Virtual PC is stripped down in features and it is now only possible to load Windows XP into the Virtual PC. Edit: You can load other OS too in the Windows Virtual PC, but so far I haven’t found another compatible one.

It is pretty simple and straight forward, it requires two files to be downloaded and a reboot.

Here is how you can do it.

Step 1: Go to Windows Virtual PC download page and select appropriate Windows 7 version (32 bit or 64 bit) and select the language.

Step 2: Download Windows Virtual PC and install it. It is required to reboot the PC after this feature upgrade.

Step 3: Download Windows XP Mode and install.

That’s it. Now you can run the XP mode Virtual PC by going to Start -> All Programs -> Windows Virtual PC -> Windows XP Mode.

Here is the screenshot of Windows XP running inside Windows 7.

Action menu allows you to option to view it in Full Screen mode, Put it to sleep, Restart and Close the Virtual PC.

You can adjust the size of RAM allocated to the Virtual PC(by default it is 256 MB), manage HDD etc by going to Tools -> Settings.

You can also load other USB devices such as web cam and printer etc by clicking on USB -> { appropriate device name }.

Windows XP running inside Windows 7.