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For my work computer, I upgraded the hard drive to an Intel X25-V 40GB (sucks that no one respects the GiB anymore, other than memory manufacturers), which has TRIM support and is well supported under Windows 7, so I took out the old HD to keep as backup and did a clean install on the new drive. Thinking that my legacy accounting software would be able to run under 7, I tried to install it to no avail. Of course I did install the 64bit version of Windows 7, so maybe that has something to do with it, but who knows.

I had read about a backwards compatibility mode in Windows 7, which is why I got the Professional version just in case, since you need at least that to run it. And fortunately my laptop was able to support Intel VT (which was actually obscured in the POST Behavior section of the BIOS setup) so after downloading and installing two pieces of software, had a virtualized copy of XP running.

XP Mode is actually pretty slick. You are automatically connected to your network, host drives and network drives function as mapped drives with clear labels, and printers are automatically discovered. You can even have applications launch directly from the Windows 7 environment. However, there is a trick to that. When you are in XP Mode, right-click on the start menu and select All Users. Your application much have a shortcut in there in order for it to show up under the Windows Virtual PC -> Windows XP Mode Applications list in the Windows 7 Start Menu. Or, if you have the option when installing applications, it must be installed for all users. So now that I have all the pieces in place and the settings configured corrects, it’s pretty easy to start up my legacy accounting software and have it run as a single window inside the Windows 7 host environment with almost the same look and feel as a native app. Kudos!

more info here.