So, I recently came into possession of a Lifeview TV tuner card. Unfortunately, it appears that the company went out of business some time ago, and no drivers exist for Vista/7. Will Windows 7’s XP mode allow me to use this card, or will I have to dual-boot XP and 7?
I’ve only read a little about this, but from what I can tell “XP Mode” is basically just running XP as a virtual machine, with start-menu integration. My experience with VM is limited, and excludes “Virtual PC”, which is the VM being used, but I seem to recall that VM don’t usually drive directly to the hardware - there’s some kind of abstraction layer in between the VM and the hardware, “pretend” hardware I guess - which would make me guess “no” about your tv tuner card.
keyword here is “guess”
There was work being done on letting VMs drive hardware directly (it needs to be integrated on the motherboard/CPU level). Does it work yet? Even if it does, I’d doubt the Windows 7 mode supports yet. But, would like to find out.
after a quick google, it seems that XP Mode requires support for hardware virtualization - so assuming the OP’s got a supported mobo, he might be fine.
Nah, there is hardware virtualization and there is add-on card virtualization. Mere hardware virtualization is pretty old, although cheap motherboards didn’t support it for a while after it was introduced (infuriatingly so). What I’m referring to is sort of 2nd generation hardware virtualization. It is called IOMMU aka VT-d aka AMD-Vi.
But, I’m not gonna bother to do the research whether it’s available yet. That’s your homework 
Windows 7 does require VT-d/ AMD -vi. Intel mid range processors and up support VT-d, don’t know about AMD.
BTW: XP Mode is only available in Pro/ Ultimate versions of Windows 7, so keep that in mind when (if) you are buying your copy of Windows 7.
Searching “windows 7 vt-d” returns surprisingly little. This ExpertsExchange post from a month ago says the MS engine does not require vt-d and doesn’t use it either. A VM-Ware implementation of it is still in beta.
According to Window’s Virtual PC website you need XP mode and Virtual PC both as they work hand in hand. And you need your CPU to support virtualization (mine doesn’t :().
My question is, does it work like WINE does in Linux? If you try to install an XP program or driver do you just do it like normal and Windows will detect that it’s an XP program and XP mode will handle the installation?
A broader question - has anybody used XP mode extensively enough to comment on whether it works well? I have SPSS 15 on my machine, which is incompatible with Windows 7. I don’t have any need to upgrade, so would love it if I could just run 15 in XP mode.
Id be surprised if this worked. Video in VMs is still not great, but youre free to try if you have Win7 Pro or higher and the proper processor. I think it would be eaiser to just buy a supported tuner. I see them on sale for like 20 bucks sometimes. Sure beats buying a higher level copy of 7 or a new processor.
Keep track of timestamps, horselover
I haven’t used xp mode, but spss sounds like the kind of app that’d work well. I wonder tho wth it does that breaks it in win7
I don’t know. I e-mailed the company and asked whether 15 was compatible. I got some weasilly-worded message that because SPSS 15 predates Windows 7, it wasn’t tested on it. Duh. Then they mention that SPSS 18 is fully compatible if I want to upgrade.
It works pretty well for me. I need to use the cisco VPN which does not work in windows 7. It works fine in XP mode so run the VPN and exceed in the virtual machine.