VMLite - an alternative Windows XP Mode impl

[septprince]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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

 

[Night Hawk]

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]

yes i to would like to try this in beta myself

 

[huisinro]

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]

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]

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]

A free download will be available in a few days.

Here is the datasheet: (diff to Microsoft XPM)

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

 

[huisinro]

The first formal version was released.

Free downloads are availabe at:

http://www.vmlite.com/index.php/download

Thanks,

 

[salem160]

There is a typo on the title bar. It is reading as Workstaution

 

[huisinro]

I really appreciate it, the typo is fixed now. thanks!

 

[Night Hawk]

No validation email came in here when signing up!

 

[huisinro]

seems some issues on user names with spaces, I just enabled your id, can you try it again? If still not work, pls send email to us, so we can reset the password.

No validation email came in here when signing up!

 

[porsche032]

it doesnt find my usb devices, how do i access other hard drives on my pc? windows 7 xp mode would display all my drives in my computer.

 

[huisinro]

Do you see H: drive in vm? if not, you can map \\.host\sfs as network drive. Each hard disk on host will appear as subdir of H:, e.g., H:\c is the c drive of your host disk.

You can add you USB drive as a shared folder in the same way. Go to mnnu Device > Shared Folders to add more folders

 

[porsche032]

i have dongle keys on the usb drives i need it so the programs work. Will it work that way?

 

[huisinro]

that may not work

 

[Night Hawk]

seems some issues on user names with spaces, I just enabled your id, can you try it again? If still not work, pls send email to us, so we can reset the password.

No validation email came in here when signing up!

That seems to have done the job! Thanks! The XP Mode for the two flavors of 7 Ulitmate were already downloaded and ready to try out if the 64bit will work as well as the 32bit. In most cases virtual wares have been limited to the 32bit only.

The workstation gui does look very close in appearance to the SUN Virtual Box.