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Windows 7 XP mode will not run on some Intel laptops

by on07 May 2009

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Must have Intel virutalisation technology


Any cunning
plan which involved running Windows XP mode on a Windows 7 laptop will depend on if you have a chip that supports Intel's virtualisation mode.

Microsoft was hoping to flog Windows 7 to some businesses on the premise that they could still run XP on it in virtualisation mode. However it turns out that its chum, Intel only included its virtualisation mode on some of its chips and many big named laptops can't manage it. Asus, Dell Studio, HP Pavilion, Sony Vaio, and Toshiba Satellite models can't do it nor can anything else with an Intel Celeron, Pentium Dual-Core, Pentium M, and Atom 270 and 280 processors.

Some Pentium D, Core, or Core 2 Duo chips can manage it but not the P7350/7450, T1350, T2050/2250, T2300E/2350/2450,
T5200/5250/5270/ 5300/5450/5470/5550/ 5670/5750/5800/ 5850/5870/5900 and T6400/6570. Those with AMD chips might also have difficulties running XP mode. Sempron processors and some Athlon 64 chips don't support virtualisation.

This could kill off Redmond's hope that virtualisation might be the way forward for those with older machines and software to upgrade. Although we would be surprised if it made any difference to the bigger picture. Microsoft needed a method to sell Windows 7 to those huge number of companies who would not upgrade to Vista because they had lots of legacy hardware and software on XP.

However even with the best will in the way they are not going to have the hardware to support Windows 7 and the memory ability to run virtualisation. This problem is mostly for business applications. The XP mode does not support games and we would have thought that there were few applications that XP can handle that Windows 7 could not.
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