Windows 7 XP Mode – New Requirements

Great News!!! One of the most renowned features in Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate was the XP Mode. Where a Windows XP Virtual Machine can be downloaded and installed. This was mostly used for incompatible applications which runs on XP and not on 7.

One of the requirement for this feature was to have a processor which supports Intel – VT or AMD-V, which makes only the newer computers with these processor types to have this feature. Microsoft has removed the virtualization-enabled processor requirement for Windows XP Mode on Windows 7.

Refined system requirements for XP Mode

• Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate
• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX® 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

The virtualization-enabled processor requirement has been replaced by a software update which can be found Here.

Providing Internet Access to Hyper-V machines through a WiFi Adapter

I was helping an organization to install and configure their infrastructure recently. They wanted to have an Active Directory, a Database Server and a SharePoint Server and wanted me to install and configure it for them.

The total solution had to be virtualized, hence I as usual preferred to use a Microsoft technology and selected Hyper-V.

I started the installation on my notebook, which has 8GB of RAM and runs on Windows Server 2008 R2. I started to install the first Guest OS (for the Active Directory). The installation went smooth without any problems. As soon as I finished the installation I faced a problem when I wanted to provide internet access to the guest machine (virtual machine). There was no way I could bind my WiFi adapter on the physical machine to my virtual machine, to see I could only bind an Ethernet connection to a Hyper-V machine.

There should be a solution for this and I started searching; BINGO 🙂 bridge your WiFi network adapter with the virtual network adapter on the host machine.

The following is what I did,

• Open Hyper-V manager
• Click on the Virtual Network Manager and create an Internal Virtual Network by selecting Internal and clicking Add.
• Give a meaningful Name
• Apply and OK
• Now a Virtual Network has been created which can be associated with 1 or more virtual machines.
• On the host machine, in the Network and Sharing Center click on Change Adapter Settings
• Select your WiFi Adapter and the Internal Virtual Network you created.
• Right click and select Bridge Network and the bridge is created.
• In the Hyper-V Manager, right click the virtual machine and select settings
• Add a Network Adapter and select the Internal Virtual Network you created initially from the drop down.
• click apply and ok

And that’s about it :)