I am buying a new computer which will have windows 7 Home Premium installed on it. Im not sure of which version it will have yet. When I contacted FileMaker customer support they told me that 9 would not run on either version and I should upgrade to FileMaker 11 which would run on the 32-bit version. Then I read that if I upgraded to Windows 7 Professional I would be able to run a virtual XP system on the computer. When I asked FM customer support about that, they said that it wouldn't work on that part of the OS.
I hope this doesn't sound really lame, but I don't know what to do or who to believe. I know there have been some questions about this in the past, but I would like to know if anyone has used FM9 and if it worked on either system and if they had the Home version of Windows 7 or the Profession version.
That doesn't mean it won't work, it just means they don't know what will happen, and won't help you if something doesn't work. Of course, given how useful FMI support is in general, that may not be a big problem for you. However I can tell you that people I know who have tried this have seen random crashes, so I personally wouldn't try it.
The XP Mode option from Win7 Pro should work fine, since it's just a virtual machine running a real XP OS. I can't imagine there being any major issues, even if FMI doesn't support it.
Another option would be to use a different vm platform, like VirtualBox. I've run FM9 in virtual machines before with no problems.