Top 3 Best Windows XP Emulators for PC
You still need a Windows XP kit and a serial number to install the OS
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If you want to experience Windows XP on your modern PC, you can use a virtual machine, which is basically an emulator for OSes. First, if you want to run old Windows XP, you can also do that by running them in Compatibility mode, you don’t need to install the OS. However, if you still want to give it a go, you will first need a Windows XP ISO kit and a valid serial number for it.
What is the best Windows XP emulator?
VMware Workstation Pro – Free and easy to use
VMware Workstation Pro is one of the best virtual machines you can get right now, and it’s free for personal use. You can easily set it up to run almost any OS, including Windows XP.
You can run it on Windows 10 or Windows 11 seamlessly, but you need to be aware that any virtualization tool, including VMWare uses the resources of your actual machine to create the virtual one.
To run a Windows XP virtual machine, we recommend having at least 8 GB of RAM for starters. Otherwise, the virtual OS will not run so smooth, especially if you’re running any apps on it as well.
It was built for IT professionals, developers, and businesses to create and test software on any device.
VMware Workstation Pro
This is the best virtualization tool to run Windows XP on your modern PC.VirtualBox – Great free virtualizer
VirtualBox is another popular virtual machine software that comes with everything you need to run Windows XP (apart from the OS kit and serial number, of course). Creating and running VM is really simple even if you didn’t do this ever before.
You can just install your OS, but you can do a lot of customization as well. For instance, you can share files, drives, and peripherals, enable drag-and-drop support between the host and guest machine, as well as copy content between the real and virtual machines.
VirtualBox supports all Windows versions, including Windows XP, many Linux versions, Mac OS X, Solaris, and OpenSolaris among others.
You can find more details about its features and capabilities in the official manual and an updated list of supported operating systems to run the software.
⇒ Get VirtualBox
Hyper-V – Best adapted to the Windows environment
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s robust virtualization tool with a pretty basic but friendly interface that can be used to install Windows XP.
You can also use it to virtualize hard drives, switches, external media drives, and other devices but it doesn’t work with sound cards or graphic cards.
We actually have a complete guide on how to install Hyper-V on Windows 10, but you can use it on Windows 11 as well.
⇒ Get Hyper-V
Here we conclude our list of the best Windows XP emulators you can use on your PC. There are more virtualization tools out there, but the top 3 above are the most solid ones out there.
If you need more information, we also have a guide on how to install Windows XP using VirtualBox and VMware.
We hope that you succeed in emulate Windows XP on your PC and now you enjoy that classic UI of the past era.
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