There's no reason that you have to develop on XP. You can develop on Win7 and the app will still run just fine on XP.

A Virtual Machine is a program that runs an OS. So, say you are running Win7. You can then run Windows Virtual Machine (a program) that then runs the OS of choice. If you go with Win 7 Pro or better, you can run XP mode for free.

For Virtual Machines, look at Windows Virtual Machine or VMWare.


>Thanks Craig,
>
>I need XP for my development, that's what my clients have and I have to keep the same operating system. Microsoft Essentials could be an option or AVG.
>
>Virtual machine sounds interesting, how would that work?
>
>Thanks.