Windows 7: Professional's "XP" mode vs Premium's "compatability"

By that you mean that "there really is nothing to compare" between Compatability mode in Windows 7 Home Premium and XP Mode in Windows 7 Professional - right? (Not that "there is really nothing to compare" between the Premium version and the Professional version in general).

Trying to make the right purchasing decision, so thanks to all of you for your input.

Please see this link on XP Mode - Windows XP Mode - Windows 7 features - Microsoft Windows - It gives you an overview of what XP mode is. Also bear in mind that XP Mode requires Virtual PC - Windows Virtual PC: Home Page

Look those over and it should answer any questions you have about XP mode.

And again, to Summarize....

XP Mode/Virtaul PC must be downloaded and installed. It will only work on Windows Pro, Ultimate, and Enterprise.

Windows Compatiblity Mode is built into all version of Windows 7.

These two programs work in different ways. The only common factor is that they both allow older programs to run under Windows 7; How they do it is the major difference.

Hope this helps.

Thx Sygnus, appreciate the info and links....

Cheers

Whats the verdict then....is it worth the download over compatibility mode? Or are there really any apps that can't be run w/o it anyways? I keep hearing people say how nothing they've tried on 7 hasn't worked, and i've been 100% lucky so far too. I noticed MS mentioned it's for business, so maybe it just works to help 7 machines work the same for networks or some such thing?

The answer to your question is in the thread, and links provided.

The business side of the house is for organizations who have large amounts of programs that would be costly to upgrade for Windows 7.
XP Mode with Virtual PC allows a copy of Windows XP to run side by side (virtual) on your Windows 7 desktop, thus allowing those programs to run in an XP environment.

Compatibility Mode runs a program using settings from a previous version of Windows. However there's no guarantee the program will work because it's still under a Windows 7 environment.

With XP mode, since the program is run in a Virtual PC the program WILL run because it's actually using a copy of Windows XP. This of course assumes the program is compatible with Windows XP.
In short XP Mode uses a copy of Windows XP in virtual PC. Compatibility Mode in Windows 7 based only.

Again read through the links I provided.

Ok, installed it along with virtual machine and it did it''s thing restarting and showing progress after boot and all that good stuff. Then when it's done and i'm back in window i look at the start menu and at some EXE and shortcut properties and i cannot find anything about XP mode. No checkable settings in executable or shortcut properties and no XP mode program on the start menu or anywhere. But it shows it's installed in add/remove progs. How the %$#@ do i use this thing? I have a game thats not working right....how to i get it to run in XP mode?

I figured it out...at least why i can't find anything. VM didn't install. I tried it again and i noticed when the pc is booting up it's saying so many percent done but what i didn't notice was the word "failure". Tried it 3-4 more times but each time is says it failed and is reverting back. So XP mode installs fine but i can't get VM to install.

Well page 1, post 2 has instructions - Professional's "XP" mode vs Premium's "compatability"

And you might want to take note of this BIOS setting tip/warning - Windows Virtual PC: Configure BIOS

yeah, i already did that. Used the detection tool which said my pc supports it, then checked bios but there is nothing at all about it in bios.

Here's a link to your bios manual and a screenshot of the virtualization page. If you download the manual (from the link below), you'll note that the bookmarks all seem to revert you to page one, so in essence, they are unusable, unless you choose to change the properties on each bookmark to correspond to the correct page. The Bios section begins on page 33, and the page shown in the screenshot is found on page 45:

GIGABYTE Download - Manual - mb_manual_ga-p55a-ud3_e.pdf