Last week I was asked, on Twitter, if it was possible to publish a built in application (like Internet Backgammon) from Windows XP mode.  The answer is: Yes, but it is a little tricky.

Most people use Windows XP mode to run specific applications that they have that will not run under Windows 7.  These people do not want to have their start menus cluttered with all the applications that populate the Windows XP menu – they just want to access their applications.  For this reason, we block publishing of all of the built in applications in Windows XP – but you can unblock them.

To test this out – I published Internet Backgammon on one of my systems.  The process that you need to follow is this:

1. Figure out the path and name of the executable that you want to publish.  In my case this was “bckgzm.exe” in “C:\Program Files\MSN Gaming Zone\Windows”:
   
2. Then you need to open RegEdit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtual Machine\VPCVAppExcludeList
3. Search the entries here and you should find a string value with a name of the executable (“bckgzm.exe” in my case) and a data value of the path.  Delete this key.
4. Reboot the virtual machine.

After doing this – the application will appear in the Windows 7 start menu:

And you can run it as an integrated application:

Cheers,
Ben

Here is a problem that I was asked about a while ago:

When I try to start a DOS application that switches to fullscreen in Windows XP Mode – it fails with an error that states “The video device failed to initialize for fullscreen mode.  Choose ‘Close’ to terminate the application.”  Why is this happening – and how do I fix it?

The reason why this happens is because Windows XP mode uses Remote Desktop technology for its integrated mode – and Remote Desktop does not support the video modes needed by fullscreen DOS applications.  The simplest way to make this work is to disable integrated mode.

This will get you from failure:

To success:

Cheers,
Ben

If you are like me, and obsessively ensure that all your virtual machines are kept up-to-date with the latest patches at all times, you may have wondered why your Windows XP mode virtual machine seems to be stuck with Internet Explorer 6.

No matter how many times you check for updates – you never see a new version of Internet Explorer.

The reason for this is that we have disabled that update in Windows XP mode by default. 

The primary reason that Windows XP mode was designed was to allow people to run legacy applications that will not run on Windows 7.  Many of these legacy applications require the older version of Internet Explorer to run – and it would be problematic if Windows XP mode automatically updated itself to Internet Explorer 8 and broke these applications.

If you do not need to keep Internet Explorer 6 around – you can update your Windows XP mode virtual machine by opening Windows Update, and choosing the custom option.  Here you will see a warning that states that some updates have been hidden:

If you click on the link to show these updates again – you should immediately see the option to install Internet Explorer 8:

Cheers,
Ben

Before I get started today – I want to make one thing very clear: the content of this post is not officially supported by Microsoft.  Feel free to try it out – but if you hit problems do not go contacting Microsoft Product support – as this is unsupported.

With that out of the way:

When using Windows XP Mode the display is limited to using 16-bit color.  If you try to change this you will see that you cannot:

For most situations – 16-bit color works fine.  However, there are some applications that require greater color depth.

It is possible to get 24-bit color support by doing the following:

• Start Windows XP Mode
• Run regedit
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
• Create a new DWORD value with a name of ColorDepth and a value of 4
• Restart the virtual machine

After doing this you will see that you now have 24-bit color support.  Now – to answer a couple of obvious questions:

• If this is unsupported – why is this option even there?  Use of 24-bit color is supported on Windows Server 2003, but it is not supported on Windows XP.  This is a case where you can enable this on Windows XP due to similar components being used.
• Why is it not supported – it seems to work?  While it works in many cases, there are times (which I have seen myself) where programs that work correctly with 16-bit color do not work correctly with 24-bit color.
• 24-bit isn’t good enough, I need 32-bit color depth?  Your best option here is to disable integration mode.  This will put you back on our emulated video card – that can support 32-bit color depth (but you lose all of the nice integration features).

Cheers,
Ben

If you are using Windows XP mode on an LCD display – you may notice that the font looks a little jagged.  The reason for this is simple.  ClearType is not enabled.

While Windows Vista and Windows 7 both enable ClearType by default – Windows XP (which was released when LCD screens were not as common as they are today) does not.

Thankfully it is quite easy to enable ClearType on Windows XP mode.  First, you will need to start Windows XP mode and login to the desktop (this should happen automatically for you).  Then you will need to:

1. Right-click on the Desktop and select Properties
2. Change to the Appearance tab in the Display Properties dialog
3. Click on the Effects… button
4. Make sure that Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts: is checked and choose the ClearType option (it will be Standard) by default:
   
   
   
   
5. Hit OK on the Effects dialog and OK on the Display Properties dialog

After doing this you should notice an immediate improvement in the clarity of the fonts in Windows XP mode.

Cheers,
Ben

It is possible to get into a state where Windows XP mode stores the wrong logon information.

There are a couple of ways to hit this problem – but the most common cause is because you have changed your password inside Windows XP.  The result is that when you start Windows XP mode you see the following error message:

After getting this error message you then have to type in your password to logon.  Unfortunately this will not fix itself automatically.  Fortunately it is not too difficult to fix manually.

The core problem is that Windows Virtual PC has a saved copy of your old logon information – and this information needs to be updated.

To do this you will need to:

1. Stop the virtual machine
2. Open the settings for the virtual machine
3. Go to the Logon Credentials page
   
   You should see a user name on this page:
   
   
4. Click on Delete saved credentials
   
   This should cause the user name field to be cleared:
   
   
5. Start the virtual machine
   
   You should be prompted for your logon information:
   
   
   Make sure that you check the option to Remember my credentials:
   

Now your Windows XP mode should logon automatically for you again.

Cheers,
Ben

A long time ago I blogged about playing Master of Orion II under Virtual PC.  In this post I talked about using the DOS version of Master of Orion II.

Recently I was asked if it was possible to run the Windows version of Master of Orion II under Windows Virtual PC.  I am not entirely sure why you would you would want to do this – as the DOS version continues to work fine – and it is widely known that Master of Orion II was written first on DOS and then ported to Windows (and that the Windows port was not the best quality).

Regardless I thought I would try it out:

And it worked perfectly.  Even the various videos and clips played smoothly.

Cheers,
Ben

My post on how to configure the default virtual machine location for Windows Virtual PC has raised a number of questions.  One of which is: what is the default default virtual machine location for Windows Virtual PC?  This question is almost always then followed by the question – why is it that?

Before getting into the answers to these questions – I would like to start by stating that this has been a surprisingly contentious issue; both with our users and inside the development team itself.  With that acknowledged – I am not trying to argue that one choice is better than an other – but rather to explain the logic behind our current choice.

Now – on to the answers:

What is the default default virtual machine location for Windows Virtual PC?

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines\

Why is that the default default location?

Virtual PC 2004 / 2007 defaulted to storing virtual machines in the users “My Documents” folder – and there are many people who like to have their virtual machines stored there.  There were a couple of reasons that drove us to change this default in Windows Virtual PC:

• Many users now have their “Documents” folder redirected to a network location.  It is preferable to run virtual machines off of local storage – so we wanted to find a location that was guaranteed to be local where we could also guarantee that the current user would have the ability to read / write.  %LocalAppData% is pretty much the only location that provides these guarantees.
• Many users who are using Windows Virtual PC just for Windows XP mode do not want to see the virtual machine – and do not care where the files for it are.  For these users the Windows XP virtual hard disk is truly more like application data than one of their documents.

Of course – if you want to store your virtual machines in a different location – the original blog post that sparked this discussion (linked at the top of this post) tells you everything you need to know about changing the default virtual machine location for Windows Virtual PC.

Cheers,
Ben

Continuing in my theme of running Windows Virtual PC everywhere – I think it is time to provide an update on my Virtual PC on Hyper-V post from just over 2 years ago.  So here is the updated Windows XP Mode on Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 screenshot:

The the same caveats from two years ago still apply:

• Booting through the BIOS of Virtual PC is quite slow.  Expect to wait for ~1 minute before the guest OS gets up and running.
• Get the Integration Components installed as quickly as possible - it really makes things much faster (for fairly obvious reasons Virtual PC cannot use hardware virtualization in this configuration).
• This is in no way supported! If you try this an find an interesting bug - feel free to send me a message but please do not call Microsoft Product Support!

Cheers,
Ben

A couple of people have contacted me and reported performance issues with Windows XP Mode on systems without hardware virtualization support.  One thing that I did not mention in my post last week was that you will need to upgrade the integration components on the Windows XP virtual machine after applying the update to the physical computer.

You can do this by:

1. Boot the Windows XP virtual machine
2. Login to the virtual machine with an administrative account
3. Open the Tools menu on the virtual machine window
4. Select Upgrade Integration Components

At this stage the integration components installer should start automatically – and will require a reboot when it is finished.

You can check to make sure you have the right version of the integration components installed by:

1. Boot the Windows XP virtual machine
2. Login to the virtual machine with an administrative account
3. Open the Start menu
4. Open the Control Panel
5. Open Add or Remove Programs
6. Click on the entry for Virtual PC Integration Components
7. Click on the Click here for support information. link

The version number is displayed on the dialog that is now opened.  Windows XP Mode ships with version 14.0.7600.16392 of the integration components.  After the upgrade you should have version 14.1.7600.16403 – like this:

Cheers,
Ben