re: The Fix for Netflix on Windows 7RC1

Steve Arnold — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:46:46 GMT

The throughput is probably being throttled back because the XP Mode is still Virtual PC; it is emulating hardware and running a separate OS on that virtual hardware. As such, the XP Mode thinks it is running on hardware that is not as good as your physical hardware. Likewise, your processing ability is greatly diminished because of all the overhead resource usage: processing power and RAM to run Win7, processing power and RAM to emulate hardware, processing power and RAM to run XP on that emulated hardware, proc & RAM to run IE/FF/etc and handle Flash (or is Netflix using Silverlight now?) within that browser within XP on the emulation... you get the idea.

But yeah, I'm glad someone's figured out a temporary fix for Netflix (I was concerned about this, as well). It's a shame MS removed "Compatibility Mode" from the feature list going from Vista to 7; I think there was less overhead resource requirements for that than there is for VPC's XP Mode, although it was definitely less stable than VPC has ever been.