Mass Effect installation on Windows 7 PC

fredvdp wrote:

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zesban wrote:

Another thing to try if you have Windows 7 Pro is getting XP Mode installed.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

It allows for an XP Virtual Machine to run on top of Windows 7 which may alleviate compatibility concerns for older software.

- Zesban

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XP Virtual Machine doesn't emulate the graphics card and is therefore useless for playing games.

That's unfortunate. My only exposure to XP Mode for games is getting very old games to run, though I've not tried any 3D games. There is still the option of dual booting then.

An easier way to get a dual boot machine going can be leveraging a cool new feature in Win7 for booting to virtual disks. Windows 7 can mount any vhd (virtual hard disk) as a bootable disk and you can then boot your machine to that environment -

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/625-boot-vhd-using-windows-7-a.html

If you're brave or technically adept you can create an XP vhd and boot to that for many older games. The above tutorial will walk you through the process of mounting the image. If you need instructions for creating a vhd there is a neat little app that can just take an existing machine configuration and turn it in to a vhd from the guys at SysInternals -

http://blogs.technet.com/b/seanearp/archive/2009/10/08/p2v-baby.aspx

So you can create the vhd from any system you have XP installed on already. You can even use a system that you already have your games installed on.

Now a disclaimer, this isn't a magic bullet. You'll want to exercise some patience with booting in to XP from a vhd, and if you're up to the task a classic dual boot by managing your own disks, boot manager, and OS installs may well be more stable. But this may work for you and be *much* faster. Your mileage may vary.

The nice thing is you can actually get to Win7, WinXP, and Win8 on a single machine this way pretty easily, though you'll be using quite a bit of disk space. And if you're not comfortable following the tutorial and using the tools linked you can always ask a techie friend to help you out. Or you may try looking for another solution.

But hopefully this helps!

- Zesban