Although, 16-bit legacy applications may have become something of the past there are still instances of these applications which are considered as critical to some businesses. In fact, last week during a conference I met an IT Manager who said that they still use a 16-bit finance package which was developed for the specific needs of the organization. Although, the organization has upgraded to another package since then, they still need to refer to it as the old data cannot be exported to the new package! The only problem they faced with this legacy application is when they upgraded all systems to 64-bit. In this case, they solved the problem by running the legacy package on a workstation running Windows 7 using Windows XP mode. Since, Windows XP Mode uses 32-bit Windows Professional, they could install and run the 16-bit legacy package.
To learn more about Windows XP Mode go here – http://www.windows7library.com/blog/util/windows-xp-mode/
I have used XPMode on W7Pro(64bit) for 9month and then VMWare Workstation for the last 2.5years and XPMode dose not stand a chance in the comparison. Of course VMWare Workstation nessesitates a licence purchase I have found it to be worth the money spent for the sake of reliability and stability of the Virtual machine.