Microsoft Virtual PC

According to the Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey for Q1 2011 from Forrester Research Inc., March 2011, “overall, 13% of employees who use a laptop at the office report that they chose their own “work” laptop and paid for all of it themselves.” That means their PC needs to work great at home and at work. And according to IDC’s Worldwide Windows Client Operating Environment 2011 – 2015 Forecast: Maturity with Renewed Potential for Disruption report, 9 out of every 10 newly acquired PCs are running Windows.

We’re announcing an update to Windows XP Mode today that will make it a more accessible to PCs in small and midsize businesses who want to migrate to Windows 7 Professional but have applications that still require Windows XP. Windows XP Mode will no longer require hardware virtualization technology to run. This change makes it extremely easy for businesses to use Windows XP Mode to address any application incompatibility roadblocks they might have in migrating to Windows 7.

Earlier today, Core Security Technologies issued a security advisory for our Virtual PC (VPC) software. The advisory calls out a proof of concept where the virtual machine monitor allows memory pages above the 2GB level to be read from or written to by user-space programs running within a guest operating system. The advisory explicitly calls into question the effectiveness of many of the security hardening features of Windows, including DEP, SafeSEH, and ASLR.  Folks are already starting to ask questions about this advisory, so I thought it would be best to answer them here.