Last May, a few months before Windows 7 was released to manufacturing, I looked at the then-current crop of CPUs available for business PC buyers and identified a potential sticking point: Some of the most popular Intel CPUs available at the time didn’t support hardware-assisted virtualization (HAV). That made them incompatible with the newly announced Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode, a crucial compatibility feature in Windows 7. (For details about Intel CPU support, see “How many Intel CPUs will fail the XP Mode test in Windows 7?” For a closer look at Windows XP Mode, see this video demo.)
The problem is that Windows Virtual PC requires hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT for Intel CPUs, AMD-V for AMD processors). And the late-2008/early-2009 CPU lineup from Intel was notoriously inconsistent in its support for VT.
READ MORE >> Will your new Windows 7 PC support XP Mode? | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
