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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

They do. Sorta. It is called "Windows XP Mode" (XPM), but it has some fairly significant limitations: it is only available to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. It also suffers from the overhead limitations of VMs - for instance, the video "card" is emulated so video-intensive programs suffer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_M...

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    it is only available to Windows 7 Professional, 
    Enterprise, and Ultimate editions

That's sounds like a business issue, not a technology limitation, unless there are costs associated with it that make it impossible for them to offer it across all of the many versions.

    It also suffers from the overhead limitations of VMs

OS X was in a similar situation, twice: first with the OS 9 classic environment then with Rosetta for PPC-compiled apps. Performance with each was less than ideal, but that's what was needed to move on.

They also have an emulator for 16-bit apps on 32-bit Windows, and for 32-bit apps on 64-bit Windows.

That's totally different then. WINE is just an implementation of the Windows API that also sand boxes windows applications into one area. Since windows actually has their API they could pull this off much better than WINE does.

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