is there ANYTHING that can be done to salvage use of old hardware with no drivers available...?

[joko]

i have a scanner - and possibly other things, that now wont work with my windows 7

i have contacted the manufacturer and they have no drivers available for win7 or vista - (i am sure i must have used it with the machine when it was vista though, but i may be wrong)

the scanner works on XP

is there ANYTHING at all i can do to keep using the scanner? its great and works fine, and it annoys me to have to buy a new one just because they wont release drivers...

is there any software available that makes it universal or something?

or can i install xp somewhere on my machine and access it just for the scanner and flip back to win7 etc...
i have seen dual boot software but would it work like that?

thanks

[ChuckFickens]

You could try the vista drivers.

You'll need to disable the requirement for signed drivers first

http://www.killertech...-group-policy-editor/

Then install the drivers and then reverse the steps above to re-enable the requirement for signed drivers.

[ChuckFickens]

2nd option (as I've just seen you asking about dual boot)

you could setup dual boot...... but assuming your windows 7 computer is fairly beefy I'd suggest running XP as a virtual machine, then you wouldn't have to reboot when you wanted to use it, it will just run in a window like any other program.

http://www.microsoft....tual-pc/download.aspx

[MarkRae]

Although, assuming these are USB devices, there's a chance that Windows XP Mode won't recognise them. Microsoft say that they have ironed out all of the bugs in the USB virtual subsystem but, in my experience, they haven't...

If that turns out to be the case, you'd be better off with VMWare Player: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

[ChuckFickens]

I was torn which one to post between the official MS solution or VMware. I personally use Vmware player (mainly because it enables me to move the virtual machines about between linux and windows host systems)

I haven't actually tried the MS virtual machine and didn't know about the USB issues so ta for that info.

[MarkRae]

Microsoft never managed to build USB support on their Virtual PC product. I used to do a lot of work with that, and it was by far the biggest complaint that users had with it.

So, when XP mode (Virtual PC by any other name) came along and claimed to have full USB support, everyone was very pleased. However, it never worked 100% correctly in my experience.

And as soon as VMWare started giving away Player 3.0 for free, Virtual PC was dead in the water. It's a superior product in every aspect.

[joko]

ive just installed that markrae, so thanks, and thanks chuck too

[joko]

the new xp partition brought up a balloon saying there was no antivirus on it - do i need any? or will the main computer protection be ok?

do i need to reinstall all antivirus stuff etc for the XP virtual machine?

thanks

[MarkRae]

The general rule with virtual machines is to treat them like physical machines in every aspect. If you need AV software on the host machine, then you need it on the guests too, assuming they are capable of connecting to the public Internet.

Remember that the software (OS and applications) running on a VM has in almost all cases not the slightest idea that it's not running on a physical machine...