Re: Anyone using Win XP mode inside of Win 7 pro or win 8.1 with virtual app?
2015/01/19 18:33:43
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I have run XP mode under Win 7 because I have an old photo scanner for which no recent driver support is available. So that would be a backward compatible issue. I would not expect newer peripherals whose drivers are not compatible with native Win XP to be able to run them under XP mode, since there is no way to connect to the driver. The virtual machine is pretty much an independent system, it does not use the host system's drivers to interface with the world.
Whether you will have problems with a particular piece of hardware that ran on native XP using the virtual machine is a question most definitively answered by trying it out. If you have Win 7 Pro, it is pretty simple to set up XP mode, somewhat more complicated to do an XP VM from scratch on Win7 or Win 8.
There is a processing price to pay for a VM, it is generally not going to execute everything as fast as a native OS, and it does not generally allow passing real time data streams between VM and host. So maybe not the best choice for getting use out of an old plugin. You can not install Sonar in Win 7 and and have it use the XP mode to make the plug work in the Win 7 Sonar. You could install an XP compatible version of Sonar in XP mode, and save a project file created in Xp mode Sonar to a hard drive and re-open it in Sonar Win 7 though, just as you could if you had two separate machines.