Running Windows XP and Windows 10 ARM on UTM for Mac
I recently spent some time experimenting with Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 10 ARM on UTM for Mac. The two systems could not have been more different in terms of setup difficulty.
Windows XP: Install and Go
Getting Windows XP running was remarkably straightforward. I simply used the Windows XP template from the UTM Gallery. The VM was configured in x86_64 emulation mode and installed from the ISO file en_windows_xp_professional_sp3_Nov_2013_Incl_SATA_Drivers.iso. The SATA drivers already included in this image removed one of the usual headaches of installing XP on newer virtual hardware.
The resulting system was surprisingly fast. Office applications, Visual Studio, Notepad++, and other utilities all worked well. Even audio playback was smooth, without the choppy sound issues that sometimes affect emulators. For day-to-day retro computing, the experience felt very polished.
RetroZilla works well enough for light web browsing and downloading. PaleMoon 24.7.2 (the last version for Windows XP released in 2014) is a bit slower but handles sites with modern JavaScript somewhat better. Supermium, a Chromium fork which runs on Windows XP, has the best compatibility but is just too slow on UTM in emulation mode. Mypal, another retro browser, somewhat worked but consumed too much memory and was very laggy during my tests. Internet Explorer 6.0, the default browser that comes with Windows XP, simply refused to open most modern websites due to lack of support for newer SSL/TLS versions.
Windows 10 ARM: Much More Picky
Windows 10 ARM, on the other hand, required considerably more trial and error. After experimenting with multiple images and VM configurations, I found that only the Windows 10 Insider Preview 10.0.21390.2025 (co_release) arm64 downloaded from archive.org would boot reliably. More importantly, the UTM machine has to use QEMU 7.2. Using newer machine types caused the VM to drop directly into the EFI shell, giving the impression that the image was not bootable at all.
Once configured correctly, however, the system booted and ran without issue.
The build is an expired Insider Preview and displays a warning at startup, but remains perfectly usable for experimentation. Native ARM applications run smoothly, and Microsoft’s x86 emulation also works surprisingly well.
It was interesting to see that Windows XP was almost effortless to get running in x86_64 emulation mode, while Windows 10 ARM required a very specific combination of image and virtual hardware just to work in virtualization mode. Windows 11 ARM, on the other hand, was far less troublesome and booted successfully even with recent images. However, because UTM does not emulate a GPU with the level of acceleration required for a smooth Windows 11 desktop experience, I still prefer VMware Fusion for Windows 11 ARM and reserve UTM primarily for older operating systems and experimental setups.
