How to use old drivers with a new OS – more on XP mode

In a post a while back about Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) I wrote “I’ve got a bad track record choosing scanners” and described the most recent one I’ve bought as a  “piece of junk”. Because my experience has been bad I don’t scan much, and because I don’t scan much I won’t spend the money to get a better experience. The scanner I have at home is an HP one and after HP failed to produce Vista drivers for it I said I’d never spend my own money on HP kit again. Eventually they DID release Vista drivers (including 64 bit) and these support Windows 7. The trouble is although they support WIA – rather than using HP’s rather crummy software for XP, they are what HP calls “Basic Feature” drivers. The video below shows what this means, and how I was able to get access to the other features using that crummy software in XP mode.

[For some reason the embedded video doesn’t play in all browsers – here is the link to the video on You tube]

This makes quite a good follow up to a video I did for Edge when XP mode was still in Beta, which showed how some 32bit-only camera software (which would work with vista or Windows 7 – but not in the 64 bit version I’m running) could be used in (32 bit) XP mode.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  have nothing but problems with xp mode. one client needs to run an app in ie6. i can get it to run, but after they close the browser window, and need to shut down or restart win 7, shutdown hangs waiting for the virtual machine to close. force it to close, and then the virtual machine is in an endless loop of remote logoff  in process, have to wait 2 minutes, and then the login dialog is presented , over and over. in the virtual pc folder, trying to restart the virtual machine gives an error, a device is not connected. There are no options to close or shutdown. just not a good experience at all.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Dave . Sorry that has been sitting in the queue for approval for the last week. There isn't a way that I know of to map SCSI devices through. Generally scanning software uses the ASPI interface to SCSI, so if you can find a USB scsi adapter with ASPI support you can map that through like any other USB device and use it in XP like any other ASPI device...

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2010
  Thanks James - very interesting. I'm still in early stages of migrating onto my new Win7 machine, but the reason I went for Pro was that I wanted XP mode to enable use of old scanner drivers. Unfortunately, though your video mentions USB, my side scanner is SCSI. Have you any idea if that will work? I have yet to be brave enough to switch the SCSI card :o(