Windows 7 - xp simulator for windows7

somebody told me that win 7 include free simulator to run windows xp on top of Windows 7 whose memory requirement is 2GB.

i have upragded my memory to 3GB, pls tell me from where to downkoad this free simulator and how to install xp from it

i am running Win 7 home premium

You must have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate to run Windows XP Mode.

Download Windows XP Mode

kf10,
With your version of Win 7 only Virtual PC is available, with Virtual PC and a licensed copy of xp sp3, and downloading a couple of other goodies so that things work smoothly, then you will be able to run XP in a virtual machine.

Before we had Virtual Mode, then this is how we did it. Personally, I think you would be better of upgrading you Win 7 so that you can run Virtual Mode.

Can you elaborate please, i.e. why would an upgraded Windows 7 e.g. Pro or Ult be better than DL'ing VPC and installing XP to it.

Another question I hope is not off-topic to the OP: what might the advantage/benefit be to running XP within Windows 7's VirtualPC, as opposed to separately installing XP on another partition of the same PC? I currently dual-boot this 64-bit machine, one partition has Windows 7 and another XP Pro x64. Could I run for example XP Pro 32-bit in a VPC on this 64-bit machine?

The main reason to use XP Mode over VPC is that XP Mode includes a licensed copy of XP. Going the VPC route means you have to supply your own copy of XP.

The advantage to running XP in a VM within Win 7 is that you can run Win 7 and XP apps simultaneously. You can't do that with a dual boot setup.

The other advantage of VMs, that so many seem to skip, is that you don't mess with bootloaders, or run the risk of destroying the system's boot capability by removing a second OS. VMs keep the host OS clean and untouched, so if you decide to add a new OS, or remove a previous one, you aren't messing with the host. Dual-booting is a dead technology!

To my other concerns: can I run XP Pro x64 in the VM? How about x32, on a 64-bit computer?

Dual-booting may be "dead technology", but it was trivially easy to do (with EasyBCD) when I was taking what at the time was a Big Jump to move to Windows 7.

When you start using virtualization, you'll see it's actually much easier than dual-booting. Windows 7 wasn't much of a jump, either, when Vista was around for quite some time, but virtualization is hardly a new concept. It's been around longer than Windows 7 and Vista.

To answer your question, whatever solution you choose will have a clear list of supported guest operating systems. However, for the most part, if you are running an x64 OS, you can run any and all x86 OSes. I believe some can even run OSX. I am not sure about the x86 host OS running an x64 guest, because I run x64 on all of my systems, and have been for several years now.

With VMs you can also have many different OSes on the same box, not sure how many beyond "dual boot" is possible with various boot mgrs out there.

On this laptop I have VMs for: XP Pro, NT 4.0, Win 2K Pro, Vista, DOS 6.22, Win ME, Mint 11, Ubuntu 11.04, Xubuntu 11.04, ReactOS, Win 3.11, Win 98SE, PCLinuxOS, Win 95 and FreeDOS. How difficult would that be to setup and maintain with each if these in it's own separate partition? If I want to uninstall any of these it's a matter of right-clicking and selecting "Delete" with no worry about messing up the boot mgr.

For the most part, I agree with DeaconFrost that dual booting is dead technology. However, there is one caveat, if you are a gamer and wish to use XP for graphically intensive games then you won't be happy with a VM. For that, I would recommend dual boot.

Have you given any time to some of the new 3D support in VMWare (and I think VirtualBox)? So far, if a game is old enough that it isn't compatible (StarCraft), it runs perfectly fine in a VM. I ran StarCraft in an XP VM for a while until StarCraft II came out.