Windows 7 promises to fight crime, cure cancer, and remove unwanted hair. But what does it really do for small and midsize companies? To find out, page through bMighty's exclusive visual guide to Windows 7's SMB features.
Small and midsize comapanies sure do love their Windows XP.
Sounds funny when you put it that way, but there's no other way to account for dedication with which many SMBs cling to their 9-year-old operating system.
That popularity means that there are lots of and lots of custom -- and not so custom -- legacy applications that run on Windows XP, and may or may not run on other operating systems.
To make sure that Windows 7 users don't lose access to those apps, XP Mode allows users of Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 to troubleshoot the compatibility of their applications, and tweak the settings for individual apps to make sure they work. As Microsoft continues to phase out "downgrade rights" and support for XP, Windows 7 may end up being the best way to keep running those legacy apps. Once it's set up, Seamless Mode lets you launch XP apps straight from your Windows 7 menus -- the appears to be running natively in Windows 7.
Ultimately, though, XP Mode is a bit of a misnomer. The function can even try to figure out which version of Windows is needed to run a particular app -- going all the way back to Windows 95!
To use XP Mode, you need CPUs with hardware virtualization support enabled. To check you can use these Intel and AMD utilities .
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