[rollei_list] Re: Scanners

We have evolved to a discussion of ways to run old scanners on Windows 7 and there are some good suggestions from the folks on this list. I decided to query an old friend who actually designs virtual machines. I haven't asked for permission to quote him but I don't think he would mind, however I have deleted all identifying information from the following. 

He wrote:


Don,
With either MS's "XP Mode" or Oracle's VirtualBox (or VMware's free Player, or several other choices), you'll be running a complete XP VM under 7. At least I know that's the case with VB and Player, and I'm pretty sure that's what's under the hood with XP Mode.
Then, in each case, the software makes some sort of attempt to integrate with the outer system so that it looks less like a full VM and more like "just running" the XP apps on 7. MS's thing may do the best job of that (they would have the most incentive); I have no actual experience to say whether that's truly the case. VMware's not-free product (about $100), VMware Workstation, has something called "Unity" where the XP programs will show up as separate windows on the 7 desktop, and in other ways tries to slickly integrate the two. I don't think the free Player has that, but I'm not sure. Another competitor product, Parallels Workstation, is a bit cheaper than VMW Workstation, though both are forever running competitive sales trying to steal each other's business. 
I expect the VMW product is better.
None of the non-MS alternatives would require you to upgrade to Win 7 Pro. Also the non-MS ones will all let you run other OSes (like Linux or OpenServer or whatever) as VMs, while XP Mode is just for XP. An advantage for XP Mode is that I believe it deals with the licensing mess (so you don't have to give up a physical license [or do what everyone probably does and just ignore the license legalities]).
Now we are really getting into deeper water than we should on this venue so I'll stop with the XP > 7 topics, however I do know that a couple of folks on this list are heavy into computers, who might find the above comments interesting.
I was, for about 15 years, president of my own computer systems house, and went through CP/M, MP/M, DOS, Concurrent DOS, and various versions of Windows, however I never bothered much with anything other than Unix, which was the OS the products we sold ran on for the most part. I learned to dislike Microsoft because many of their early products were unstable, but in retrospect I believe that many of the failures were caused by bad memory chips, now greatly improved. I do remember some postings about how long a Unix system had been up without going down and the number was somewhat over 18 years at the time. Can anyone say that about Windows?
Anyhow, I will try to combine the info he gives above with some responses from this group and reach some sort of conclusion. 

Regards,

DAW

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