Howto create a Windows-XP Virtual PC image to use with Windows-7 Home Premium as is available in the Professional and Ultimate version

Question

I purchased Vista Home Premium 64bit System Builder OEM DVD last Summer from Newegg, and received the free upgrade to Windows 7 end of October. At long last, I am about to carry out a clean install (using Custom install advanced option) of Windows-7 from Vista. I am concerned that some application I will re-install might not run in 64bit Mode and would require such functionality as Virtual XP PC.

Home Premium does not include the Windows-XP virtual PC (VPC) included in Windows-7 Professional and Ultimate. It is disappointing to find out if I bought directly the Professional version it would have cost me less than upgrading Home Premium to Professional with Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade. . I am unemployed and in training at an unpaid internship, it is too expensive. I wished I could return to Newegg my Home Premium edition and pay the difference to get Windows-7 64Bit Professional. Note that between my wife and I we could be eligible for student discount.

(As a side note: Don't you think that such capability should have been integrated in all version of Windows-7 for backward compatibility?!)

The post Creating a Windows Virtual PC image from a Physical machine offers some great suggestions about creating your own Microsoft VPC. The only XP copy I have is an OEM DVD for Satellite Toshiba laptop, which hardware failed a few months ago when it was dropped. The other copy is that installed on an ancient gateway laptop, decommissioned.

Is it realistic to use either one of these to build my own Virtual PC for Windows-7 Home Edition?

I did rebuild an install DVD from the Toshiba OEM "recovery" DVD image so that I could customize the partitions during the install (to separate out Users data from Programs, ...). It remains that it was derived from an OEM Toshiba XP flavor, which might require some Toshiba specific hardware signature. Will the included drivers and manufacturer OEM license create issue to virtualize XP on my Windows-7 64Bit desktop PC?

My desktop was custom build last summer with a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard and I7 920 Intel processor with 6Gb DDR3 memory.

Thanks, Donat

Answer 1

You say that between you and your wife you could be eligible for a student discount - is she a student? If so, you should try going to http://www.win741.com/. If she has a .edu address, she's eligible - if not, there are some alternative conditions which she might satisfy. I believe the student price has gone up from $30 to $65, but it's still probably cheap enough to be worth looking.

Other than that: if it was an OEM-licensed copy and had been installed on the Toshiba, I do not think you can use it to make a virtual machine unless you can resurrect the Toshiba motherboard and create the VM from the installed version. (And even then, it's a bit iffy.) Normally you could call up Microsoft and explain the hardware failure, but I think that to be transferred to a new motherboard, it has to be covered under warranty from the OEM. (It sounds like yours is not.)

Good luck. And I'm in firm agreement with you about the cost to upgrade from Win7 Home Premium to Win7 Ultimate... it's far, far too much.