22-01-2016, 12:35 PM
I've got a new PC running W7pro which I must get round to commissioning properly as my main PC. I have important (to me!) software which won't run under W7 but will run under XP. Some of this software dates back to the days of DOS but is OK under XP. I could keep it on an old PC but that's less convenient.
AFAIK the XP VM in W7pro is a bit half-a***d. In particular I really need 32 bit XP which I don't think is done at all well in 64 bit W7 pro. Hence using VirtualBox was a no brainer. It's free, easy enough to get running and does what's needed. It can get a bit complicated exploring all the options for connectivity, memory etc and you take a slight performance hit. That performance hit is more than offset by running it on a newer and faster PC. For example I need to use an older Xilinx package for some older devices. It runs happily in the XP VM but I reckon I'm taking a 20% to 30% hit on performance compared to running on a host OS. But since the nwere PC is abut 3x faster than the one I used to run it on who cares. One area that might not work so well is if you have something that's very graphics intensive (photoshop, video editing, games) running on a VM but I don't have that problem.
If printing is really a problem from the VM then print to PDF from your application using a free PDF writer package. Then print the PDF from the host OS. I appreciate this might not work for DOS software which has its own printer drivers. TBH, this can easily give grief with a modern printer anyway.
AFAIK the XP VM in W7pro is a bit half-a***d. In particular I really need 32 bit XP which I don't think is done at all well in 64 bit W7 pro. Hence using VirtualBox was a no brainer. It's free, easy enough to get running and does what's needed. It can get a bit complicated exploring all the options for connectivity, memory etc and you take a slight performance hit. That performance hit is more than offset by running it on a newer and faster PC. For example I need to use an older Xilinx package for some older devices. It runs happily in the XP VM but I reckon I'm taking a 20% to 30% hit on performance compared to running on a host OS. But since the nwere PC is abut 3x faster than the one I used to run it on who cares. One area that might not work so well is if you have something that's very graphics intensive (photoshop, video editing, games) running on a VM but I don't have that problem.
If printing is really a problem from the VM then print to PDF from your application using a free PDF writer package. Then print the PDF from the host OS. I appreciate this might not work for DOS software which has its own printer drivers. TBH, this can easily give grief with a modern printer anyway.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
