Does the Windows XP Mode in Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate work within Parallels? I need to extablish a VPN connection and use IE 7 in Windows XP to access a business network. I have not been able to find non OEM Windows XP disks. Thank you.
If you mean the Virtual PC based Windows XP virtualisation that's available for Ultimate / Enterprise, then no - the "XP mode" is a virtual machine, and you can't run a virtual machine inside a virtual machine (at least not with Parallels to my knowledge). However, what you can do is set up another Parallels VM that's running XP. You can then run the 2 VM's (the Windows 7 VM and the XP VM) concurrently on your Mac. That's way more cool;-) Copies of XP can be bought here, for instance.
My problem is that there are a multitude of Windows XP versions on Amazon.com, and I do not know which versions will actually work. Some of them are OEM, which I have been told would not work. I checked with a local computer consultant, who said that a full version of Windows XP would be over $250. Thank you.
Have you ever tried installing an OEM of XP on a (newly created) VM? I tried that last year with an OEM version of Vista, and that worked well (except for the fact that I ended up with an English version of Vista and needed some hacking tools to change the language pack). XP doesn't do online activation as far as I know.
