Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Windows 7 – Windows XP Mode: Part II

In the first part of my post on Windows XP Mode I noted that whilst my laptop’s processor supports hardware assisted virtualisation, the BIOS on my Acer laptop offers no option to enable this. This is a problem because Microsoft Virtual PC only runs on hardware that supports hardware assisted virtualisation.

I was hopeful that I would be able to set up a virtual XP machine using the Windows XP Mode download from Microsoft and VirtualBox.

Indeed I was. It worked well. Until I tried to activate the virtual copy of Windows XP. XP Mode includes a license key as part of the installation, however, this key cannot be used to activate Windows XP using the conventional activation mechanism. Attempting online activation using the supplied key fails.

When activation fails, there is an option to activate by telephone using an auto-generated 60-digit installation identifier. Unfortunately, the telephone option declares that there is an error in this identifier and declines to supply a key to activate Windows XP. Worse still, at least in the UK, the telephone option is fully automated with no option to speak to a person to find a resolution.

Thinking about this, I’m not surprised by the problems in activating the XP image included in Windows XP Mode. I’m quite sure Microsoft have checks in place to ensure that XP Mode hasn’t provided a source of freely downloadable, licensed XP images.

I assume there is some interaction between Windows Virtual PC and XP Mode which handles the activation process and ensures that the copy of XP supplied as part of XP Mode is correctly activated and licensed.

At the very least, I assume Virtual PC ensures it is running on an appropriate edition of Windows 7 and uses this information to assist in the activation of XP Mode’s XP image.

I’ve read the EULA for XP Mode and as far as I can see it is perfectly legal and valid to use XP Mode with alternative virtualisation solutions. Sadly this seems not to be supported in practice.

In summary, it seems from my experiments that the only way to use XP Mode on Windows 7 is to use the officially supported combination of XP Mode & Virtual PC on a machine that supports hardware assisted virtualisation. If anyone knows differently, I would like to hear from you.

Next steps…

Time to take a break from getting XP Mode to run on my Acer laptop and reflect on just over a month of life with Windows 7…

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