Windows 7: The truth about MinWin: the heart of Windows 7

One of the main problems seen with Linux is simply put it still UNIX based while the gui and additional packages are a constantly changing open source OS not being standardized like you would expect to see with each progressive version of Windows. At this time it's become more of a beta tester's OS since every so many months one or the other distro has a totally new release effecting the main gui.

For the more MS friendly distros like ubuntu, Knoppix it can serve well live as an emergency data recovery tool booting from a live cd as well as seeing an excellent cross platform drive tool(GParted of course) while not always as friendly to the novice user. Windows on the other hand sees a far larger range of softwares as well as now seeing the largest improvement seen in 7 for the desktop OS.

I think what you are now seeing is MS maturing a bit more as a company in general taking into consideration what the average home user looks for in an OS. Support, reliability, and flexibility! Besides seeing the regular updates MS is now taking into consideration those that still have need to run older softwares with the introduction of the XP mode besides simply seeing an updated Virtual PC from the 2007 version.

The use of virtualization of XP in windows 7 is interesting in this case. Perhaps MS is preparing us for landslide change of the kernel, much like apple os9 tp osx. In which case the seamless virtulazation of the previous version (s) of windows will help a lot to solve legacy problems.

This should clear a few things up...

Yes and No. When Dave Cutler was brought in to start designing NT as the new UNIX killer for MS, the original plan and the original builds, were for it to be commandline only. But, because it would need to run OS/2 apps (MS and IBM were working together on OS/2 at the time), Cutler wanted basically a VM to startup when Presentation Manager (OS/2) programs were started.

When Windows 3.0 took off, Gates realized that he had a winner and he forced Cutler to change ways. MS bailed on IBM and decided to have NT become the new flagship 32-bit OS, capable of server and workstation ops. The Win32 API was quickly developed, from the Win16 API (bugs and all). This then had to be bolted onto the kernel that Cutler had already started, and that process was much harder than expected.

Unfortunately, Win64 continues the string of quick ports from Win16 to Win32. MS is between a rock and a hard place. A new GUI API is needed to remove so much of the kruft that has built-up over the decades, but the amount of effort involved in doing this, and the number of apps that would be broken by this is unacceptable to them.

They have treid to mitigate this with various frameworks, .Net, WPF, etc,, but all of these still require interaction with Win32/Win64.

Peter Bright, an admin on ArsTechnica, has written some really good articles on where MS has dropped the ball. He is a very knowledgable programmer who provides some pretty good insight. He is very plain spoken, so if you are easily offended, you might want to avoid direct contact, but he certainly knows his stuff.

PhreePhly

With Vista also installed on the new Virtual PC beta release I found a few definite drawbacks for seeing previous versions installed unlike what is seen with the XP mode. First forget any sound since you can't install device drivers for video and sound for whatever you are using there.

In the Virtual PC you ares seeing a virtual video adapter used instead. Despite efforts to use the automatic updates the sound card plus tv tuner card remain unidentified yelow marked items in the device manager there. The second main drawback is simply no access to other hard drives and addons like flash or pen drives. The only other drives avialable are floppy and the dvd drive used for installation.

Vista other then that still runs the same. The XP Mode loads in a minute's time there and has ready access to all drives internal or otherwise. You hear sound using the existing 7 setup while still using a virtual video card.