VMLite - an alternative Windows XP Mode impl

septprince · 04 Sep 2009

Hey huisinro.
It will be great if you guys can release a public beta of your software. So that we can give it a try.

Night Hawk · 04 Sep 2009

Excellent point! septprince Or at least a beta for testing purposes would be another thought. That would allow feedback and bug reports from a larger number of users there.

huisinro · 04 Sep 2009

Yes, that's a big problem for old machines. For example, if hooking modern USB 2.0 external hd on USB 1 machine, it's extremely slow. Some old machines don't even have USB ports, in which case, one has to use network shared folders to store the generated images. Network is much slower than USB 2.0 hard disk.

Night Hawk said:

The one problem I see with the pre 98 stuff of course is usb. 98 needed separate support there for USB 1.0, 1.1 where XP saw 2.0 support included.

When you are working with old 3.5" floppies and old 9x cds you still need some type of direcct access means for optical and floppy drives until the OS is installed on the vhd itself unless you are simply trying to convert an existing installation into a vhd environment as you were mentioning before.

Most of all that required access to ide controllers at first since that's how the fdisk and setup.exe files were written. You need to trick the old installers for this like you see when custom installing the 32bit 7 for example like I did here seeing that go onto the former Vista vhd right when as the VPC was starting which detected and autoloaded the 7 installer or booted the live cd for Linux.

huisinro · 04 Sep 2009

yes, we will provide beta version soon. We are going through the internal testing cycle at the moment.

Night Hawk · 04 Sep 2009

For the old anchors the option for addon isa or pci firewire adapters would be the alternate if not considering a nic card as viable.

Try and find a brand new isa card for an old 286 machine? That would be something to see!

kenshen · 04 Sep 2009

yes i to would like to try this in beta myself

huisinro · 06 Sep 2009

Thanks for your interesting in our "MyOldPCs" converter.

yes, we will release the beta in about a month. If Win95/98/NT4 not ready then, will release 2k/XP/Vista/7 version first.

We did some optimizations, it actually goes to 100G per hour with USB 2.0 external harddisk, easily beats all P2V tools from other major vendors. For example, one vendor's tool is extremely slow as 15G per hr with
exactly same config.

A 250G (used space) laptop takes about 2.5 hrs to convert with our converter, while it takes about 16 hrs with the other vendor's tool.

Night Hawk · 06 Sep 2009

I've been working 500gb drives and later here with the OSs mainly on the 500s. The next build will likely see 1tb or 2tb drives only there. The 25ogb per hour rate will certainly be an important factor there!

huisinro · 07 Sep 2009

right, P2V performance is very important. With this fast speed, it can be used to backup live system. Instead of xcopying files (which is very slow), one can just dump out the whole system. I use it to clone my dev machine regularly. Can either mount the vm file to gain access, or run it as a vm for a live machine.

huisinro · 09 Nov 2009

A free download will be available in a few days.

Here is the datasheet: (diff to Microsoft XPM)

http://www.vmlite.com/VMLite%20XP%20Mode.pdf