I finally got around to setting up "XP mode" on my Windows 7 Ultimate
box. On the whole, I'm reasonably impressed.

 There's one thing I'd like to do, though, that I can't seem to figure
out. I don't know if it's impossible by design, or if I'm just not
looking in the right place...

Configuring XP mode creates a folder (possibly magical in some way)
called "Virtual Machines" containing an object that looks sort of like a
file -- double-clicking on it or on a shortcut that points to it
launches the virtual machine and runs a task that looks very much like a
Remote Desktop client to provide access to it.
 So far, so good.

 What I'd like to do is create multiple XP virtual machines, with
different names and settings, separate copies of critical system files,
different applications installed. If one gets infected by a virus, I'd
like to be able to discard it and clone a replacement from a saved basic
template....
 In the "Virtual Machines" folder, I can select my virtual machine,
copy it to the clipboard, and paste it, and Windows happly adds " copy"
to the name of the "file", which I can then rename to something more
meaningful.
 BUT if I try to launch this copied virtual machine, I get an error
that "no such configuration file could be found", which seems to suggest
that one of these "virtual machine" objects is only complete and usable
if some other component elsewhere matches it, and needs to be
copied/renamed in sync with it.

 I should perhaps explain that I've been using Parallels Desktop to run
XP virtual machines on Macs for a couple of years, and this has
undoubtedly led me to form expectations of how this kind of feature
works that may not perfectly match Microsoft's implementation. The most
obvious difference that I can see is that only a limited folder in the
Mac filesystem is shared with the virtual machine, whereas on Win7 the
XP virtual machine sees the all the Win7 drive volumes as mounted shares
-- it's not yet clear to me where the virtual machine thinks its system
drive is.

 I've been relying mostly on the book "Windows 7 Inside and Out", and
finding its coverage of this area a bit sketchy. So maybe what I really
need is a better explanation of this feature and how it works. What I'm
trying to do seems useful to me, but so far I can't tell if Microsoft
disagrees, or if I'm simply not going about it the right way.

David Gillett


                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                        Mark Rode<[log in to unmask]>