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Paul said:
The WinXP Mode uses Microsoft Virtual PC, a successor to VPC2007.
And VPC2007 is I/O bound on several interfaces. For example, you
can be using a network interface with proven 117MB/sec transfer
rates, and the virtual network interface will do 1 to 1.5MB/sec.
There are similar, illogical limitations, on storage. I'm really
surprised the SSD helped you. It should have been smothered by
the purposeful bottleneck in the virtual machine software.
At one time, you couldn't even have a full sized DVD "passed through"
to the virtual machine. The last time I tried, I think I could read
up to the 4GB mark in a VM. If you insert a dual layer DVD, I'm not
sure a VM can read out to the end of it. All I could figure was,
the optical drive interface seen inside the virtual machine, was
memory mapped somehow, and that was presenting a limit to the size
of the optical media. Perhaps if you have a movie player in WinXP
Mode, you could test that out and see. I doubt they would fix that,
for the Windows 7 version of Virtual PC. If the test can make it past
the 4GB mark, then probably anything would work (like Blu Ray playback
in WinXP Mode).
I don't get why some gets all excited over running XP mode under Windows
7? Yeah I can see the fun of doing so, but it just isn't practical. As
nothing runs XP better than XP itself.
It's funny my first home computer was back in '81. And one computer was
really great! But I soon discovered that two computers is even far
better. And three is better yet, but two was the largest jump in
greatness. Back then I wasn't using multitasking OS. So only one
application could run on each machine at a time. So if I wanted to have
four applications running at once, I needed four machines.
One would think the practical need for multiple computers would end when
multitasking OS became popular. It did sort of. But a single computer
still can't do it all very well. Even today I find more than one
computer is still more practical for so many reasons. And just like back
in '81, they all don't even have to run the same OS to get virtually all
of the benefits.
Heck just yesterday, I finally got around to installing my AverMedia TV
tuner software under Windows 8. I should have done that on day one and I
don't know why I waited so long. Anyway I thought it was working just
fine. Although when I ran it under the Media Center, the same problems
popped up that pops up under Windows 7. The Media Center overwhelms my
dual core CPUs and the video turns into a slideshow instead of a video.
But at least I remember that my AverMedia TV tuner software would work
fine running without the Media Center under Windows 7.
Although the shock I got yesterday was my AverMedia TV tuner software
wasn't fine under Windows 8 even without the Media Center. Now I am
going to have to retest this under Windows 7 once again. As using the
time shifting feature was just too much for my Intel Core2 Duo T7400, as
it got choppy. Worse was recording into another format, which means the
software has to convert the video in real time into another format. This
uses lots of CPU power. I've never seen any of my dual core CPUs ever
peg all of the cores to max before. NEVER! But it did yesterday
converting the video in real time.
Oddly enough, this isn't a problem under XP even on this T2400 CPU. In
fact, this CPU under XP has Speedswitch enabled and most of the time it
is clocking at the lowest speed. This isn't true if I am running Windows
7 or Windows 8. They are running at max most of the time just idling. I
haven't tested XP with Media Center yet because I never installed that
version yet (it is on my things to do list).
Now I never ran XP mode under Windows 7 yet (and may never get around to
it). But I am so sure without even trying it out that running my
AverMedia TV tuner software under XP mode would be a total bust! True
that would be a bad example, but others things would also suffer. So why
bother? If you need XP mode, just fire up another computer running XP
itself. What's the big deal?
)