I must be the least savvy windows buyer ever, I went from Millenuim to Vista and was all ready to "upgrade" to Win 8 :ugh:

Not least savvy just unsuspecting through lack of knowledge I would suspect.

You have been badly served by having two of M$'s less good operating systems!

In my opinion Millenium was awful and Vista was only slightly better! It is interesting to observe how M$ can build fundamentally good operating systems like W98 and XP and equally fundamentally awful operating systems like Millenium and Vista!

I went from XP which I liked to W7. I downloaded the W7 Release Candidate made my PC at the time dual boot in case W7 was a dog but after a day or two never used XP again and pre-ordered a copy of W7 when the initial version was offered for general sale.

Interesting issue about being forced to drop XP. What about the number of applications home users may have which will not work, due to lack of suitable drivers, on later OSes. I purchased a device for scanning slides to my PC, which at the time was (and still is a desktop running XP). I later bought a more powerful laptop running Windows 7, and looked forward to using the scanner on the newer and faster machine. But no, I couldn't because there was no driver available for the scanner in Windows 7. Result, I either have to stick with using the older desktop or junk the scanner and buy a newer one.

As far as I know, no one is forced to drop XP. MS says that they will cease sending out patches within less than two years, but that doesn't mean that XP will roll over dead.

Since some important (to me) programs won't run under Win7, I will keep at least a couple of the machines I support running XP. That will be true at least until the effort to move to newer software is successful.

If one desires to be conservative, one should disconnect XP machines from Internet access after MS abandons them.

seacue

Errrrr no, I have the same problem with a film scanner, I just run it in a virtual m/c running XP (free from Microsoft) within windows 7, problem solved. You do need windows 7 pro though.

Thanks for the tip Green Granite. I don't have Windows 7 Pro though. Would it work with VMware do you know?

Interesting to see the usual stories about windows millenium being trotted out.
The only thing really wrong with it was the lack of a proper DOS shell. In many others ways it was far superior to what went before:
USB2 that worked, wireless networking that worked, system restore, the ability to restore missing or damaged files near-automatically
Add to that the enforced absence of windows installation CDs meaning that customers had to use recovery images instead.
In short, all these changes more than halved the number of support calls to our company. In reality Me was a lot more reliable than any of the Win95/98 variants that preceded it. I'm convinced that most of the criticism was simply because it was still a 9X OS - most people had expected a consumer version of NT instead, something that didn't happen until XP. As a result, disappointment - especially as Win2000 was available at the same time. Customers compared it to the NT stability of Win2K, instead of the instability of 95/98, forgetting that playing games in Win2K could be very hit and miss

It might but unless you've got lots of ram I suspect you would be better off quarantining the XP M/C from the internet remove all the software other than the scanner stuff and your image manipulation program and you will probably find it faster than the laptop anyway.

Just returning to an old post.

I am aware that VMware supports XP as a guest operating system (hello again mixture), but will I need a valid license key for XP. I have XP on my home built desktop machine, and had it on my old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, but they were both OEM licenses.

If I have to purchase a new license key (is that still possible for XP), then I may as well just junk the scanner.

If you are going to run any version of Windows in a VM, you need a valid licence key.

Just buy a new scanner

Thanks Milo.

Therein lies the hidden costs of upgrades. Never as cheap as it seems.

Or if you can afford the space pull the network cable on an XP system and leave it sitting in the corner to use as needed for scanning and other legacy software tasks.

Yeah... and if the so called "cost cutting" management stopped letting themselves be screwed by the same old set of suppliers, perhaps they would start being presented by quotes that were more affordable.

Its always the same story with UK government IT... they pay way over the odds for a system, the development and deployment of which overruns in both time and budget and is sadly lacking in the features they actually need.

Because they paid over the odds for it in the fist place, it takes many years to adequately amortise the expenses.

How strange, was having similar battles with my flat bed scanner, a Microtek 4900. A very capable scanner but no drivers for the HP (Win 7 Home Premium). I use my old Tosh (XP Pro) to control the scanner which is networked to the W7 machine. I scan directly to a drive on the HP and edit from there.

A bit clumsy but a workaround for now.

'twas fun and games when XP was released and the several of the scanner suppliers either didn't release drivers, or were slow in delivering them
Mustek and Scansoft were both guilty

I had to create a series of batch files which changed the reported version of Windows in the registry to Windows 2000, installed the drivers and then changed it back to Windows XP
So....a batch file which edited
\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Product Name to "Windows 2000 Professional", then ran the setup, and then reverted the registry change. I needed two versions of the file for each scanner....one for XP Home and one for XP Pro.
There was nothing wrong with the actual drivers....except they wouldn't run if the reported version was XP.
I haven't tried it in years, but I wonder if the same trick could be played on Win7 using XP drivers?

Re the comments about scanner drivers,I had the same problem when I got XP, then I found VueScan.

VueScan Scanner Software for Windows 8, Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), Linux, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Android

Not cheap, but better than the original drivers and I'm still using it.

Vuescan is an outstanding product. It tends to perform way better than the manufacturer's own software.

I just did a random check of half a dozen scanners supposedly suppyorted by Viewscan, and all six required drivers to be downloaded from the scanner manufacturer. It looks like Viewscan is replacement software onl - in many (most ???) cases it does not overcome the lack of drivers. So it may not help
Best to check for details of the specific scanner at VueScan 9 Release Notes

Another vote for Vuescan - outstanding product. sensible pricing. sensible licencing.

Cross platfrom and works better than most official scanner software.

Support Vuescan!

Mac

:ok:

"VueScan supports more than 2100 different scanners on Windows, 1800 scanners on Mac OS X and 1600 scanners on Linux. These scanners are organized by vendor name below.

IF your scanner isn't on this list, VueScan may still work with your scanner if you can find a WIA driver (Windows) or an Image Capture driver (Mac OS X) on the scanner manufacturer's web site."