Windows 7 and Serial: Virtual Machine?

[ASForrest 12]

Hi all, I've been having painful issues trying to download to a few older AB devices over serial. I'm using a USB to serial adaptor thats supported by windows 7 and all but my downloads keep failing halfway through. On one PVP400 it took over 20 attempts to successfully download, and the download took around 90 minutes (on a very basic, black & white, non-touch-screen display). After talking to a few people about my problem, they're all telling me the same thing: basically that Windows 7 is the devil and I should be running a virtual machine with XP. Can anyone else confirm their suspicions, or offer any other advice? If I'm going to go the way of a VM, I don't have any problems with ethernet comms on windows 7, so for ease of use I'd prefer to stick to windows 7 wherever possible. But if I need to use a serial driver to communicate with something, I'll need XP. Working out rockwell activations does my head in, but is it possible/practical/doable to have all the activations running on my laptop - not a dongle - and be able to access them in both windows 7 and VM windows XP? Also, does anyone have significant experience running VM's on Windows 7 that can tell me which ones to go for and which ones to avoid like the plague? Or what my laptop specs will need to be to run VM's successfully? I'm running Windows 7 Professional 32 bit, 4GB ram, 2.1GHz Dual core. Thanks!

[dmargineau 6]

I am truly sorry to add to your frustration...Forget Win7 and legacy automation... I have tried all the tricks in the bag in order to successfully approach every scenario, however, it seems that it was always some .dll, registry or driver which needed to be tweaked or re-tweaked in order to satisfy the at hand issue and then of course the next one wouldn't hold up... So you could do yourself a favor and acquire a Win7 64-bit machine with at least 8GB of RAM, one WinXP SP2/3 license and one VMware Workstation licensed copy. I would create as many XP running VM clients as your needs require (I have one VM for Rockwell Automation products, including FactoryTalk, one for Siemens/Pro-face or any Java based software and one for Omron, Mitsubishi, AutomationDirect, Modicon, RedLion, etc. stuff) and you'll probably solve all your issues. I know that XP support will not last forever, however, by the time it expires, either legacy has been 100% retired or we will have other "undiscovered" options...

[OkiePC 14]

I would try to use a 64bit host with 8GB of ram. I am using XPMode successfully, although I understand it to be the least user friendly and I did struggle to get the LAN connections sorted out at first. Now, it runs FctMe View Studio like a champ with 1GB allotted to the VM. A little utility I found online allowed me to make backups of the VM (google XPMORE), and we even successfully moved it over to another engineers machine, changed the IP address and now he has the same set up without having to install all the software again. There have been a couple of things that behave differently like mounting a USB device, and the fact that shortcuts to shared drives seem to "break" between hibernations. If a VM novice like me can get it to work with XPMode, I expect using VMWare or HyperV would be much easier still. Edited 13 Nov 2012 by OkiePC

[Ken Roach 194]

One important thing to know about VMWare and serial communications is that the "COM Port passthrough" performance is slow at best, and unreliable at worst. Don't run the Windows 7 drivers for your USB/RS232 interface; let VMWare connect the USB port directly to the XP Guest OS and run the serial drivers there. In most cases, you just need the Virtual Machine to be in the foreground when you plug in the device, or you connect it using the "Removable Devices" option in VMWare. I did some side-by-side tests of a download to a MicroLogix 1200 controller using COM port passthrough versus USB pass through, and the USB method was more than twice as fast.

[ASForrest 12]

Thanks guys. I've used VMWare before and found it to be quite stable (once it was set up right), although I wasn't involved in setting it up before, so I might have to take a crash course :) will I need to upgrade my ram/upgrade to 64 bit or is that just a nice-to-have? I need it to be pretty reliable, but (hopefully) the VMWare will just be my go-to in case of serial or strange annoying problems, I don't need to be running everything through it.

[OkiePC 14]