Running Widows 7 and XP at the same time

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I seem to remember reading someplace that I could run two operating systems at the same time…

I have W7 on one drive and XP on another drive.

I was wondering if I could run them both at the same time so I wouldn’t have to boot into them seperately…

Sometimes I just need to run something on XP that doesn’t run on W7 and it’s a pain to reboot into the other operating system.

Thanks

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It’s called Windows 7 with XP mode.
I don’t believe there is any other way to do it but in a virtualized environment.

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Yeah Clint, I figured as much…
Unfortunately I have W7 Home and would have to upgrade to Premium for that feature..

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You should still be able to do it, but not with what Microsoft offers.
(you would have to use a, presumably paid for, 3rd party VM tool)

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Well Clint, something amazing just happened..

The program I want to run is Pro show which is a slide show program…

It worked for awhile in W7 but lately all it does is crash…

I used Windows Explorer and browsed over to my XP drive and created a shortcut for the program and saved it to my W7 desktop…

Now, the shortcut opens the program on Windows 7 and it works fine.
The strange part is that the shortcut points to my D drive which has XP on it…

So, I don’t know yet if it’s running the program on the XP drive or opening the program on my W7 drive…

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When you use a shortcut to a program on a different machine all that happens is that the program is copied to RAM on your PC and executed there. If the program in question was running for a while on the Win7 PC and crashes when you use the version from the Win7 PC but the copy from the XP machine works then I suspect the copy on the Win7 machine has been corrupted.

Joe

--Joe

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I have been using the free http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ to easily use two different OS at one time. Try it.

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Joe, the program works fine on XP.

Here’s a screen shot…
As you can see the paths are different but all the other tabs in the shortcut are specific to W7..

As I said in my first post, the shortcut in W7 will open the program but as soon as I try to use it, it crashes..

While the shortcut I copied from XP runs the program fine..

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How the program executes on XP is not relevant to how it is currently executing on Win7. When you run a program the program is copied from the location indicated in the shortcut to RAM on the executing system. So, Windows 7 does not care that the shortcut happens to point to a disk drive that coincidentally is an XP system drive. All Win7 cares about is that the program exists in the location to which the shortcut pointed so it can load the program into RAM.

Joe

--Joe

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Well Joe, I see what you mean…

If I continue to have problems with it I’ll just run it under XP…

I’m not buying any upgrade to solve the problem when it’s cheaper to run it on XP..

Life sucks!

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