So, I just got tired of the limitations of the “Windows XP Mode” VM running on a Win7 Pro host. It worked, was stable and had most WinXP features available, but it just wasn’t the whole enchilada. So, back to VirtualBox and on with a (spare) copy of WinXP in a VB VM.
Installed slick as goose… urm, grease. Took a hair less time than installing on bare metal on a physical machine, mainly, I suppose, because the virtual hard drive formatted in a flash.
I’m not much of a fan of Windows XP–never really warmed to it–and the Virtualbox VM isn’t as completely integrated with Win7 as the M$ VM, but it works, and the whole enchilada is available for when I need to walk someone through some steps over the phone. It’d be entirely unnecessary, of course, if I could do all remote support with direct remote access to the computer in question, but not everyone has broadband (still) and remote access is impossible over dialup–besides the fact that some issues cannot be addressed with remote access, anyway.
Not all that big a thing. It’s just WinXP anyway.