PCPro the UK website just put out a fantastic list of their suggestions for improvements that Microsoft could make for Windows 8.
Here are some of the ones I agree with:
Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate support a virtual Windows XP environment, in the form of the imaginatively named XP Mode. But there’s definitely scope to take the idea further.
For those who want to try out other operating environments, starting with a “bare” virtual machine could be far more convenient than repartitioning your hard disk and managing a multiboot system.
Even better, Windows could maintain a virtual clone of your machine that you could use to test out unknown software without messing up important settings, losing data or falling prey to malware.
It should even be possible to migrate installed applications directly from the virtual machine into the real one, once you decide you trust an application and want to keep it.
Perhaps this is a feature mostly for “power users”, but since Microsoft owns the Virtual PC virtualisation package, it isn’t unrealistic to hope it might come to pass.
Sounds good.
For power users, those in the business, etc. this would be invaluable. Looking at Med-V though with all of the limitations I doubt MS has the wherewithal to make it usable. Look at how long it took to get “Ghost” added to the OS. (I think the issue on this one was that they hated a deployment strategy that used imaging. They wanted an SCCM architecture…. Imaging was straight forward and super quick but inflexible. (under engineered). Now that we are ‘there’, users can get a quick recovery tool that actually works.
Sometimes I wonder how these kinds of discussions go within Microsoft. On this forum we get to do the fun part – what if, wouldnt it be great to have… Now throw in the marketing guys, the strategic positioning guys, the technical guys, the financial guys, even the regulatory guys and see how much fun those discussions are. Frankly I dont want to see how sausage is made but its also why we get some of the junk we get….
I dont see this happening.