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Windows 7 XP-Mode

L

lightp2

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2009
Messages
672
1. I have XP-only applications. Currently no investment for app upgrade. The situation is work with what I have. I can buy new PC if desktop failure or too old.

2. I am left with 2 choices.
2a. Buy New PC with XP downgrade. XP Performance will be good. However, Users prefer new things.
2b. Buy New PC/Win7Pro and deploy XP Mode

3. I am on plan 2b.

The following relevant after choosing plan 2b.

4. Users from Pentium 4/Celeron/Athlon 64 single-core environments so any new PC should be good. The new replacement PC are mostly C2D e8xxx dual-core 4GB or 2GB RAM. Athlon II also if available.

5. We have fine-tune PC a bit by short-stroke entry-level hard disk to keep HDTune score between 11-12ms/seek mostly around 80-IOPS (4K-random). I got 100MB/s average HDTUNE score for one example case. 2-drive RAID suggested but no approval. Some PCs no AHCI support so NCQ is off.

6. The PC should be good enough for normal single user. Everything seems snappy. To get idea of multi-use I ran 2 instances of HDTUNE simultaneously and then the disk performance dived immediately.

7. I understand XP Mode Disk Storage has differencing mode. You have Parent Disk and in-use modified disk image relative to the Parent Disk.

8. I would like to build updated Parent Disk image, save it on SSD. Share it out on network.

9. Other workstations will use the parent-disk-image-on-SSD over network, and modified image on local disk. Since the image on SSD is seldom modified, wear-leveling issue should be minimal. I get the SSD Read-IOPS benefits. The local mechanical disk will handle the write issue.

10. Some on 100mbps ethernet desktop switch so I do need to buy Gbit desktop switch to upgrade the link.

Questions

A. Your opinion on this scheme? Does it work, or am I wasting my time? Anything I need to watch out?

B. How many XP-Mode connection can the single SSD handle in this arrangement?

C. Or perhaps over network, the no-change parent image will be aggressively cached in memory by the File Server (Windows SMB or Linux Samba) so there no actual need for the SSD at all? I am not sure.

Edit : Sorry I forgot. I am not sure whether I can mount parent-disk over network. I will check when back to office.
 
Last edited:
a.) you're wasting your time, and making this unneccessarily complex. allow each machine to have it's own parent disk, and stop trying to complicate things. in the end, you're adding everal layers of complexity, and troubleshooting to what should be a simple implementation. not to mention the fact that you will have to troubleshoot networking issues to address any weird OS related items, on each desktop. Put SSDs in each PC and be done with it.

b.) dont do it. limit for all versions of XP is 10

c.) again, please don't go this route

edit: not likely

Also, keep in mind that to run XP mode, you need a CPU capable of VT-D or Pacifica. Please check the CPUs for the new machines before just buying whatever C2D is cheap at the time. I could see this being overlooked, since you're obivously trying to get creative with the parent disk, I'm suspecting you're on a restrictive budget.
 
sabregen said:
Also, keep in mind that to run XP mode, you need a CPU capable of VT-D or Pacifica. Please check the CPUs for the new machines before just buying whatever C2D is cheap at the time. I could see this being overlooked, since you're obivously trying to get creative with the parent disk, I'm suspecting you're on a restrictive budget.
Click to expand...

Actually they dropped the VT-D requirement. Link
 
Now all the cheap bastards get it too? I knew I hated MS for something... thanks for showing me what it was :)
 
I would definitely suggest you try XP Mode before you buy it. It's nice that the applications launch right in their own windows and look native to 7 but the way that you access drives, save and print files is different. When your going to file->open within the 'xp mode app' your actually looking at virtual drives and that is going to confuse the hell out of novice users that what they are seeing is not really there.

Make sure you try it and get everything you want working in a way your users will understand before you make a big investment.
 
Hi, appreciate all your response.

1. Yes, I am basically on "pay only if absolutely needed" budget

2. We bought new and also some refurbished outlet systems to save cost.

3. Currently all the replacement PCs are on C2D E8400/8500 2GB/4GB RAM. XP Mode can only run single virtual CPU so these high-clock 6MB cache CPUs do help.

4. For now, I am still on fine-tune single local disk storage setup. Users seem happy with performance. Permission given that if performance is too slow in future, I can buy a second disk so that XP mode runs on it's own disk or RAID setup in future.

5. I also tested Launch XP-mode-app in Win7 setup. We have many old applications, even dos-based applications so users ended up doing the traditional route with full seperate XP-Mode screen.
 
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