Windows7 on virtual pc - windows-7

I would like to check out Windows7 and install all of my developer programs on it just to test if everything works fine. In the mean time I want to continue my work on my Vista os. Is it possible, using Virtual PC, to install Windows7 and afterwards replacing my Vista installation with this Virtual PC Windows 7?

Take a look at using a bootable VHD. I have one with Windows 7 and use this as my "playground" for testing things like VS2010 Beta 2, Office 2010, etc. The VHD is a single file so it's portable and the performance hit for the virtualization is minimal.
Instead of running a Windows 7 VPC inside Virtual PC inside Vista, you are booting into a Windows 7 VPC - no Vista. works great for multi-booting. Once you're ready to move to Windows 7 as your primary OS, you can still use it in a VHD.
This link may help out...
http://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-add-a-windows-7-vhd-to-vistas-boot-manager-menu/

In theory, yes. Back up the virtual image, then restore it to your hard drive.
In practice you may find issues with drivers, specifically video, as effectively you're moving a Windows image from one "computer" to another.
You'll also need to make sure that the Windows license comes over properly - best to not activate it while it's virtual.
If it were my box I'd probably want to do this to a fresh hard drive, so I can fall back to Vista if all goes wrong. So rather than virtualize, I'd just buy a new hard drive and use that for Windows 7 straight away.

Have you considered dual-booting?
Also: Windows 7 was designed to be compatible like Windows Vista, unlike how Vista was sometimes incompatible with XP. You probably shouldn't have any problems with compatibility.

Related

will Windows 10 be activated if installed on a laptop that used to have it preinstalled, from an external medium like a DVD or flash?

I accidentally wiped-clean my Toshiba Satellite's hard drive, including the recovery partition and the preloaded Windows 10 that was stored on it. Now, the only option I believe I have is to download the ISO, burn it to a DVD or flash, boot the laptop from it and install Windows 10.
If so:
Will Windows 10 be automatically activated ?
Will Windows detect the laptop is one with preloaded copy of Windows and as such license it automatically ?
I don't have any product activation code, the only code printed on the laptop floor is the laptop's serial number...
Thanks.
Anecdotally, the same thing just happened to me. I deleted all partitions and re-installed it completely fresh on a Dell Latitude laptop, figuring I'd lost the license.
In my case, the laptop is licensed just fine. I didn't do anything specific to license it.
As a side note, The ISO I downloaded didn't specify version, though it defaulted to Windows 10 Professional before when I used it on a custom-built machine. This one defaulted to Windows 10 Home, something I also didn't specify. I don't remember for sure which version I had before I nuked it.

Unable to create the virtual machine

I was so happy today that I have been finally able to install Windows Phone 8 SDK and try it a bit. I installed fresh new installation of Windows 8 Pro into my virtual machine (I am running if from Parallels) and then installed Windows Phone 8 SDK.
Everything went smooth, Visual Studio Express is installed and running, but when I created new project and tried to deploy it, VS fails with really weird message.
First of all, message box informing that "The Windows Phone Emulator wasn't able to create the virtual machine: Generic failure" appears. Really informing, really professional - generic error, that's really good. Then the information that deployment failed appears (thanks a lot for keeping me informed about that, I didn't noticed that it crashed completely). And then in the Error List, there is an information about "Invalid pointer" - even better. No clue at all about what failed or what's wrong.
Can anybody help me with that? There is nothing on the internet about this topic so far and I don't know where the problem is. I scanned the Windows events and logs, but there is nothing (probably I haven't been searching properly, so please guide me through that if you can).
Anybody can help?
The Windows Phone 8 emulator requires hardware Hyper-V support. In particular, it requires second-level address translation, hardware assisted virtualization, and hardware DEP support enabled and to not be ran in a hypervisor(no nesting). If you bought your machine within the past 4 years you should have no problem with these requirements. You can check out this article to see more information about that and how to find if your PC supports it.
Because of these hardware requirements, this means you can't run the phone emulator inside of most virtualization technologies... With one exception: I've been using VMWare 9 which appears to include an "unsupported" feature to allow Hyper-V to work though.. So your only choice for running the phone emulator is to either buy VMWare 9 (or 8 with more configuration) or upgrade a physical machine to Windows 8
The unsupported way VMWare allows you to run Hyper-V inside of a VM is that there is a manual option (hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”) which basically tells VMWare not to report to the virtual machine that it's running in a VM. Hyper-V checks if it's running in a VM and won't work if it is, so this gets Hyper-V to work past that check. I personally have tested this whole nested-VM thing with the Phone emulator(including before public release), and other than being quite slow, it does work pretty well with no immediate crashes or anything.
There is a workaround for VMWare Workstation 8 as well in an answer below. However, 9 is much easier to configure, so if you have it use this method.
I ran into the same issue and I fixed it by enabling Hypervisor applications in this virtual machine and adding the following line to the .vmx file:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"
This got the emulator working just fine. I found this answer here.
Hope this helps.
Actually, it works quite nicely with VMware Fusion 5.0.1
All I had to do is to add to the .vmx file of the virtual machine the following lines:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”
vhv.enable = "true"
Save and restart VMWARE (obviously the VM must be stopped before the changes are made)
I'm right now debugging a test app from VS2012 using the emaulator inside a VM in my Macbook
I'm a happy camper
:-)
I posted the same question on Parallels forum.
Reply:
The emulator is actually a virtual machine, so we are talking about a vm inside a vm, this requires support for nested Hyper-V, which afaik is planned but not implemented yet, also VMWare Fusion already supports this, if you are so desperate.
————-
See Parallels forum post: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=646448#post646448
This works for me
Set RAM to 4g
Set at least 2 cores
add to vmx file.
vhv.enable = "TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0="FALSE"
Goot article
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wptools/thread/ed72010c-321c-4667-97b2-3ff1540e7f87/
You need SLAT compatible hardware to run Hyper-V, which is a requirement for using the emulator.
Can you clarify what kind of hardware you're attempting to run this on, and if you have enabled Virtualization in your BIOS settings?
The "Invalid pointer" error just means it cannot connect to the emulator (and/or device).
Just as an addition to https://stackoverflow.com/a/13163762/1964969 (top answer at the moment):
manually appending "hypervisor.cpuid.v0" key works for VmWare Player 5 as well (the main reason - this software is free for non-commercial use so it's perfect product if you test the waters, just download from VmWare website and install, it's fully-functional).
Slightly unexpected, any of the following amends solve the problem with WP8 emulator:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0="FALSE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0="TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0=""
Yeah, you can apply empty value for that key - but why? Have no idea but it works. I did some notes in my blog as well:
http://windowsasusual.blogspot.ru/2013/01/how-to-launch-windows-phone-8-emulator.html
Under Parallels Desktop 8 follow this guide: http://kb.parallels.com/en/115211
Edit:
Oh, I didn't noticed that you are trying to run emulator on VM. My answer is for non-VM environment.
First of all, you need to check hardware requirement at here
Be careful, successful installation of SDK does not guarantee "your hardware is compatible"
If your hardware is compatible and Hyper-V is running(described in the link above), please check your BIOS and be sure to enable hardware virtualization in CPU Configuration
(for me, I could find it at Booting > BIOS > Advanced > Advanced > CPU Configuration)
Brief summary:
64bit CPU and OS
4GB RAM
Hardware-assisted virtualization supported CPU
Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) supported hardware
Hardware-based Data Execution Prevention (DEP) supported hardware
Proper BIOS settings
For me the solution adding line:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"
I use VMware Player and added the line (hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE")in the .vmx file.
My virtual machine with Windows 8 Pro runs the emulator for Windows Phone 8 perfectly.
Solved the problem by uninstalling an older VPN client from the machine. It turns out some VPN clients might have compatibility issues with Windows 8. After uninstalling VPN client I was able to run the emulator without issues (of course after making sure Hyper-V was installed and enabled on the machine)
Not enough rep. to comment on the accepted answer, but Microsoft provide instructions specifically for Fusion here. It worked for me, after a couple of reboots of both Mac and VM. I installed W8.1 without Hyper-V support initially and had to install it after the fact ("Turn Windows Features On or Off" in Control Panel), but apart from that no problems. Quite speedy on a 16Gb 2013 MBP.

Is there anyway for me to create windows 8 apps(for PC and Mobile devices) on mac

I use Mac OSX. I now want to try and develop an app on windows 8 for the Imagine Cup.
But i dont want to switch back to windows.
Is there any way to develop apps for windows 8 from mac?
Preferably free option....
The only available way is to use Virtual Machine because one cannot develop Windows 8 Modern UI app(Windows Store app) even with lower version of windows than windows 8. There are many virtual machines are available for free. Virtualbox maybe a good start.
www.techspot.com/guides/503-windows-8-virtual-machine ,A Tutorial to create vm of windows 8.
Assuming that windows phone is the platform you chose to develop app, again you need windows to create windows phone app.
Kick start your windows phone app development here .
I actually use VMWare on a Mac to do all of my Win32 development on Windows 7 and VS2010.
You will need:
a powerful mac (i7)
lots of RAM (I have 8G, I wish I had 16G)
a 7200rpm HDD or SSD.
With that, it's really great for me. I've been doing this for a few months now without a single kernel panic or blue screen at all.
Note: You cannot really develop for WP7 using this sort of configuration. The WP7 simulator uses VirtualBox, which either runs extremely slowly or not at all in other VMs, based on our experience. Will need a real Windows machine for that ^_^
It's a workable scenario. Good luck!

Old 16-bit Application Causing GPF in WIN87EM.DLL, intermittently

I've got an old 16-bit application, that was developed for Windows 3.1. It preforms some calculations and is part of a more complex system. The system sets up the inputs for the program, and collects the output results.
Unfortunately, the 16-bit program is here to stay for the mean time, so we have to work around the frustrations it causes on modern operating systems.
The system runs on Windows XP, and on physical Windows XP machines it runs alright. The machine I'm having a problem with, is a Windows XP instance running on VirtualBox (version 4.1.12) on a Debian box. The physical computer is an HP Proliant server, with Quad Core Xeon 3.4 Ghz. I'm using remote desktop to access the computer from my Windows 7 box.
The error I'm getting is, "PROGRAM caused a General Protection Fault in WIN87EM.DLL at address : 0001:02C9". The annoying thing is, at times it works and other times it doesn't, making troubleshooting all that more frustrating.
From trawling the internet, I've come across a few sites that mention the same problem. None of them seem to offer real solutions, except to say that WIN87EM.DLL supplies floating point routines, and has some issues with certain printers.
I've uninstalled all printers on the virtual machine, I've also tried installing a PDF writer and setting it as the default printer - so that there is a printer on the machine. I've disabled resource sharing with my Remote Desktop connection. I've updated the Virtual Machine Guest drivers on the machine. I've also tried setting the compatibility to Windows 95 in the properties of the executable.
Any pointers for troubleshooting this problem, or methods I could try to get it working?
This question is old but I had this exact win87em.dll crash with some 16-bit factory automation software running natively on windows 7. By following the method of HIDE87.com and editing autoexec.nt I was able to make the software stop crashing so that I could make edits.
This machine was running Intel 8 Series/C220 Series chips. I attribute this configuration to the crash because I have used this same 16-bit software on tons of other windows 7 machines for years now.
edit: here's the steps I used to fix the problem
Download winfloat.exe from http://www.conradshome.com/win31/archive/
Open winfloat.exe with 7zip. Find HIDE87.com and extract it to desktop.
Copy HIDE87.com to C:\Windows\System32\
Open c:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt with notepad
At top of file, after first group of comments add the following
lh %SystemRoot%\system32\HIDE87.com
Add a comment above your last line
REM Fix for Gen. Protection Fault in win87em.dll
Save changes to autoexec.nt and reboot pc.
This was the same error I had with Microsoft XP Mode.
Obviously WIN87EM.DLL has Problems with virtualized processors.
My Solution: I "unloaded" the XP-Version of WIN87EM.DLL in the registry (search and delete every item with this name), and copied a much older version into application folder. The old version can be found her: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/86869/de
Good luck!
Video Driver win87em.dll
This is the step by step resolution to the problem we had with the “win87em.dll” issue.
Left-Click the START button in the bottom left corner of the screen.
Right-Click My Computer and left click Properties.
Left-Click the tab at the top that says Hardware
Left-Click the button that says Device Manager.
Left-Click the + sign next to Display Adapters near the top of the list.
Right-Click the items shown in the expanded list under Display Adapters and left-click Disable.
Left-Click the Yes button that shows when windows asks if you are sure you want to disable it.
Left-Click the No button when windows asks if you want to reboot.
Repeat the disable process for each item listed under Display Adapters (usually only one or two)
Reboot the PC and the win87em.dll General Protection Fault errors should go away.
This is only applicable for users on Windows XP. Most likely the display adapters listed will be shown as an Intel G41 internal display adapter, but it may be another Intel device. If this does not fix the issue then it is likely a bad printer driver causing the problem.
Disabling the video adapter will not hurt windows. It will make their computer unable to watch videos or play 3D games, but windows will still run and look fine. (They will probably need to change their screen resolution after rebooting.)
VirtualBox 4.3.16 should also have a fix. See https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12646 If you want the fix immediately, you'll have to build VirtualBox from OSE sources.
Update: VirtualBox 4.3.16 containing this fix is now officially released.
I know this is an old thread but I came across it while searching as I was having the same issue under Windows XP running VirtualBox. Eventually I found the following:
https://communities.vmware.com/people/jmattson/blog/2012/03
This is for VMWare and seems to have fixed the issue, couldn't find anything similar for VirtualBox but as VMWare Player is free it is a good workaround for anyone having this problem.
in the case of virtual machines - vxBOX (tested) of VM ware (maybe)
you just have to switch off all para virtualization options in the processors section of VX BOX options.
works like magic!

True-Time debugger / hiwave.exe: run multiple instances?

I have a couple Freescale 68HCS08 MCUs connected in an I2C network, running different programs. When I click "debug," Codewarrior checks for a running instance of hiwave.exe to load and debug the program. I'd like to debug both simultaneously, which means having two instances running.
What is the best way to do this? Do I need two PC's? Is it better to try and manually reload the MCU's, using the Build command instead of Debug in Codewarrior?
I can run two instances of hiwave.exe manually, and then use the "File"->"Load Application" menu item to select the .abs file. It seems to run both instances fine, including code display and breakpoints, although I'm using full-chip simulation rather than a hardware debugger at the moment. I would guess that's where most of the fun is, in making sure that each instance uses the correct debugger, especially if you're using two of the same USB devices.
"That's too easy", I can hear you saying. Fine, take option 2:
I do all my CodeWarrior / Hiwave stuff in "Windows XP Mode", a Virtual PC running under Windows 7, mostly because CodeWarrior's installer doesn't run on 64-bit architectures (or it didn't a few months ago, for which I yelled at them in their forums).
I'm not entirely sure of the licensing technicalities (if you have Windows 7 pro, you should get at least one free license to use the Windows XP mode), but perhaps you could do something similar - e.g. run a Virtual PC environment with one of your debuggers passed through to the virtual system (Windows Virtual PC and other virtualization environments let you pass USB devices through), and have your other debugger still attached to the 'host' system. You could then have CodeWarrior/Hiwave installed on both the virtual and host systems, with one controlling system A and the other controlling system B. USB fun-time still applies, as you'd have to make sure the 'correct' USB debugger was passed through to the virtual system.
The debugger, HIWAVE.EXE will not work in either Windows XP mode, nor VMs such as VMWARE WORKSTATION, nor any of the VMs available in Linux. This is to do with the way the driver for the USB MULTILINK has been architecured.
Making Codewarrior v6.x work in Windows 7 is easy, by patching the installer.
We were not able to get the debugging pod to work to debug live hardware, because of the fact that the USB driver is implemented with Jungo Windriver, and, as per other articles, neither of the virtual machines can push that across into the virtual environment.
I have wasted months trying to solve this, in the end we resurrected old XP licenses and installed XP. However safe to say that, this, combined with Freescale's lack of vision to allow people running Linux to develop for the silicon, forced me into a decision that I will no longer use their products.
However, running multiple instances of the debugger is possible. The maximum seems to be around 20

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