vmware workstation 12 out now - built for W10

Not the download from that page I ended up with apparently. But the original question wasn't about which ones are free to use but the one that is totally free being the non commercial only. The others likely have a few extra features to consider and when you are at company the company picks up the tab for licensing as a business expense! As an employee you simply run it free to do your work!! That's how that goes.

For the home user however no one else is picking up the tab and if you want extra treats and additional support is provided for something only in the paid for releases you then buy the license. That's how things work as a rule in the software market. It still would be interesting to have a total breakdown on just what each is capable of. If you look at the main product page there's quite a bit there under various categories to choose from with each for one type of application or another.

Wow read through this post from beginning to end, very interesting....

I have a Windows 10 Home PC which I want to run XP on also, the fact that XP is running on a W10 PC needs to be virtually transparent to the user....would like easy support for USB pens, so do I use Hyper-V , VMware, or try dual boot ( which doesn't look difficult ) would be ok not to have both OS available at the same time...

thanks

There's a vast contrast between how you go about seeing XP go on at this late date. One word of advice is on VM and not any dual boot on physical drives without unplugging the 10 host drive first to see XP as a stand alone install on a separate drive. And there's a very good reason for that.

Besides already having been dropped from MS support a year ago April you won't find any device drivers unless you are presently running 10 on an old boat anchor! Newer hardwares simply see no support for any physical install while the better option would be running the XP mode on one of those two options.

As for VM ware you can run multiple VMs at the exact same time as long as you have the extra memory available. Sometime back I would have XP Home, the XP mode, Vista, and 98SE all running simultaneously on four VMs until the 4gb simply wasn't enough back when first looking into the old VM Player free version no longer seen. That also had the Player Pro replaced as well now with the Workstation Player Pro simply adding "Workstation" which there has been all along a Workstation version as well as the Player.They simply put the two names together now seeing the option to buy the commercial license on the Player version as well as what you would find on the Player Pro to upgrade the Player to Pro.

With the Hyper-V feature enabled you will find quite a bit more as far as options and settings while you are only able to run one VM at a time. The Hyper-V Manager won't allow even a second vm to start up while you have to work with for the single vm. You would be better off there with the XP mode I was under the impression the XP mode was the vm form of XP Pro if not mistaken since that was mainly intended to get businesses to upgrade to 7 back when first released as a 90 day evaluation tool. That was so businesses could still keep their XP apps running on a vm instead.

thank you

At first it will take a bit in order to get familiar with how things go for each of the options referred to as well as other methods available. The Hyper-V is definitely a little bit more involved there but not too difficult to grasp. The Workstation Player and Virtual Box do tend to simplify things more so.

Reviewing the guides for VM Workstation and Hyper-V in the tutorial section is always a good place to start! But if you should get stumped for any reason you can start a new thread in the Virtualization section easy enough. :)

lx07 said:

Any hypervisor would do. Whether you want to do that or dual boot depends on what you want to use XP for.

Are you wanting to run XP as some old hardware doesn't work or some old program?

Note that it would probably be unwise to connect a XP machine (real or virtual) to the internet as you'll not get security fixes any more.

XP is needed for some old software which refuses to run on any OS post XP.....dual boot would be fine, selecting which OS at startup..

Interesting, your comment on XP not being secure on the Internet, just visited my local branch of TSB bank while he was starting the PC up to check my account I notuced it was running XP not good for a major bank I would have thought...

XP by itself wouldn't be secure! But you have to also consider the additional layers of security banks as well as other commercial interests will see added on. They typically have professional software developers and security analysts on the payroll advising them on how to keep things secure, develop new firewalls, etc..

As for as not being able to run old XP apps on anything newer that would be have pertained to Vista which saw a gap especially when Fat support was removed entirely while XP could be installed on a Fat32 primary. When 7 came along however MS had to put the old support back in along with the new MinWin kernel where suddenly the 32bit side of 7 had not a problem running many older XP apps without the compatibility mode needed!

Have you ran the 32bit 7 at all? Try Metal of Honor: Allied Assault as one XP Only title that certainly wouldn't run on the 32bit Vista no matter what as well as any 64bit Windows but went right on the 32bit 7 while 7 was still in it's own beta to RC stages. 7 being a newer version to begin with will still be seeing support until 2020 being a preferred option as far as any physical install. You shouldn't have any problem locating any device drivers while XP as well as any other OS can be run on the virtual side without too much difficulty.

Here to find having both XP and 7 media still onhand I would see two VMs for finding just what will run on 7. Yet at this time another option still comes up depending on the type of app you have if that just happened to be something even older like Legacy/Dos compatible where you could use an extra like DOSBox. Speaking of old how about some old 8 bit stuff!



That was on the 64bit 7 RC at the time there. So "just imagine the possibilities" with the much more advanced options a program put out by VM ware will see in comparison to that basic emulator there. And what some don't want to hear but the way things are going Virtualization by itself is still a growing field.