XP in Virtual PC under Win 7 - a few questions

[Roger Mills]

I have just bought a new laptop running Windows 7 Professional (32 bit) and have installed XP in a virtual machine to cope with the odd applications[1] which won't run in Win7.

One application which will only run in the virtual machine is Jaws PDF Converter - which installs a pseudo printer driver and, when you 'print' with it, a PDF file is produced. I would like to be able to share this 'printer' so that I can print to it from Win7 applications, but I haven't yet succeeded in doing so. I can go into the printer setup menu on the virtual machine and can tell it to share the printer, but I still can't see the 'printer' from the Win7 side. Does anyone know whether this is possible and, if so, how to do it?

If I can avoid it, I don't want to have to install all the applications from which I may want to 'print' to PDF files on the virtual machine.

[The same would probably apply if I had a *real* printer whose driver only worked in XP, and if I wanted to print to it from Win7.]

Another thing which seems odd to me - but perhaps it's to be expected - is that although the Win7 system and the virtual machine share the same physical network card, they've somehow acquired different IP addresses which are not even in the same subnet. This seems to result in a strange combination of what is and isn't visible to what when I try to ping the physical and virtual machines from each other and from other computers in my network. Anyone know what to expect here?

I would welcome comments from anyone who has managed to suss this virtual machine business, and whose experience is more extensive than my two days' worth.

[1] I've been agreeably surprised with what *will* run in Win7 - including a number of old applications originally written for Win9x!

[John Rumm]

Which virtual PC are you using? The one that comes with win7 (aka "XP Mode") or a bolt on like MS Virtual PC or Citrix?

Have you tried sharing it as a network printer? (that may be what you mean!)

Which might explain difficulty seeing network resources shared on one machine from the other!

Assuming they are both (i.e. win7 and the virtual pc) set to DHCP an address, they ought to grab an address from your DHCP server (usually your router).

You can try an "ipconfig /renew" from a command line to force either to go back and get another.

The other solution is to assign a fixed ip address to one or both machines. (ideally, tweak the range that the router can hand out to not include your static addresses).

If auto configuring they will typically grab consecutive addresses from the router (unless it is a clever one that remembers previous mac address to IP bindings).

[Owain]

Try another PDF 'printer' CutePDF seems popular

Owain

[Adrian C]

At a guess, (I'm a VMWare geek) you need to set virtual hardware support features in Windows 7 so that network services are 'bridged' to the virtual network card in the XP guest, not 'NAT'ed'

Oh hang on, lets google 'bridge windows 7 virtual network'

[Roger Mills]

That's another possibility, of course! However, I like Jaws because it handles security well (with control over whether the resulting PDF file can be edited, printed, etc.) and it attaches itself to Word's file menu making it very quick to turn a Word document into a PDF file. Having said that, that last bit is unlikely to work if word is installed in Win7 and Jaws in the virtual machine.

[Dave Liquorice]

Why not just install one of the many available .pdf "printers" that will run under Win7? I'm sure there must be one that fits your requirements re security, editing etc of the resultant file.

[P.V.]

"Roger Mills" kirjoitti viestissä: [e-mail]...

Could it be that the virtual XP machine is actually set to use NAT? If that's the case you could simply change the setting to the one with the physical network card's name (the setting is in Virtual PC's network settings). Then the physical computer and the virtual one would be like two computers in the same network with IP addresses of the same subnet.

P.V.

[Rod]

What about the gDoc products from the same company? Looks like Jaws will not be made to run on W7. (I have no idea what the product is like.)

[Roger Mills]

I'm using (MS) Windows XP Mode in conjunction with Windows Virtual PC, both of which I downloaded and installed by following instructions on the MS site.

Yes, that's what I've tried to do - and I've given it the name "Jaws". The system has assigned the name "VirtualXP-41525" to the virtual machine. When browsing for network printers on the Win7 system failed to find my shared 'printer', I entered it explicitly as \\VirtualXP-41525\Jaws - but it

*still* couldn't find it.

Just done that, and it's come back with the same address as before.

I might resort to that, but I need to understand how it's *supposed* to work - see below.

I would have expected something like that, but that's not how it appears to work! The address given to the virtual machine is *not* in the range which I have allowed the router to dish out under DHCP - and is not even in the same subnet. To be specific:

Router's own LAN IP: 192.168.1.110 Router's DHCP range: 192.168.1.80-90 Physical computer's IP: 192.168.1.81 Physical computer's Gateway: 192.168.1.110

all pretty much as I would expect.

*However*: Virtual machine's IP: 192.168.131.65 Virtual machine's Gateway: 192.168.131.254

It's as though there is a virtual DHCP server which is dishing out addresses from the 131 subnet instead of the 1 subnet to virtual machine(s)

Anyone seen anything like this?

[John Rumm]

ok, I have used that - but not under win 7 yet...

Probably because it has no route to it... its IP address places it outside your subnet, and hence requests would be routed toward your default gateway (your router). You might be able to fix that adding a static route - but it ought not be necessary.

They may have changed something - but I sometimes use virtual PC to run a few Win servers. They all seem to DHCP nicely from the real DHCP server...

Well at least that is not in the "windows can't find an address, so its going to make one up" range you sometimes get!

If you do ipconfig /all on the "real" pc, do you see multiple addresses allocated to any of the network adaptors? (might be worth doing the same on the virtual box as well to see if it gives any clues)

(on my system the virtual PC creates some pseudo network interfaces on the real PC. The virtual PCs also get their own mac addresses - they don't share that of the real nic)

What about a "route /print" on both real and virtual PCs

The ipconfig /all should list the DHCP server that yielded the address.

[Bill]

In message , P.V. writes

I've just had to do this for a friend and can confirm that you have to set the network adapter in Tools to the same physical one as the machine. The Help files are utterly confusing.

I don't know about the pdf thing, I just use Open Office, but I had a terrible time seeing the printer on my workgroup. It's an old Xerox P12 that has to use HP IIP drivers. You have to pretend the virtual XP has a parallel port, then install the drivers, which only appear after you hit Windows Update in the printer install menu. Then you have to remember that they are I's not 1's and that IIP is later in the alphabet than IIIP. Install as a parallel printer than let the virtual machine find the networked printer and it will install the drivers. The remove the phantom parallel printer.

All this might be obvious to others, but not to this old man.

[Roger Mills]

Thanks for that link - that's great. Having un-NAT'd the virtual machine, it has now been given an IP address in the same subnet and range as the Win7 system, and I can now see the shared network printer, and install it in the Win7 system.

The fact that it doesn't *work* is another story! On further investigation, it doesn't work in the virtual machine either - I was so pleased that I got it to install, that I didn't test it!!

Anyway, assuming I *can* get it to work in the virtual machine, it should then work in Win7 also.

[mike]

bullzip pdf printer works in win7

[Andy Champ]

Wouldn't bet on it. I'd expect to install a driver for any real network printer, and I don't see why this "printer" would be any different.

Andy

[Roger Mills]

Many thanks to all who have replied. Bullzip does indeed work in Win7 - and will suffice for most purposes, although it doesn't seem to handle security in quite the same way as Jaws.

I've now got Jaws working in the virtual machine (which is an advance on yesterday) but although it goes through the motions of allowing me to share it and then install it as a network printer on the physical machine, it doesn't actually 'print' but just sits there like a lemon instead of displaying a dialogue box asking where the PDF is to be saved. I only want to do the clever stuff with security on Word documents, so I guess I shall have to install Word on the virtual machine to achieve that.

Thanks to whoever it wqas who suggested that the virtual machine was NAT'ed. That was spot on and, by pointing its network config at the physical network card, I've now got it in the same subnet as the host machine. This enables me to 'see' shared printers from the host but, as I said above, Jaws sadly still doesn't work as a shared printer - but I have a solution I can live with.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Roger Mills writes

Why so surprised? It's just another warmed-over version of WinNT.

[Roger Mills]

Largely because I asked here a while ago about old applications on Win7, and got lots of horror stories about things which wouldn't work.

I did at least go for the 32-bit version, as recommended by several people, and also for Professional - which means I can run a virtual XP system if needed.

[Mark]

I found a some (very important) applications that worked on Win95 all the way up to XP stopped working on Vista. I haven't tried Win 7 but I see no reason why it would be any different.

[Adrian C]

Toasted teletubby topping, with extra cheese and anchovies..

Many things broke there, hence now why virtual running of XP is an interest.

From Vista, Microsoft banned some user installed driver processes operating in the 'Kernal mode' security ring-fence, and thus killed the compatibility of existing print drivers, for me my Panasonic KX-P7510 laser printer. Panasonic wouldn't do the decent thing and write new 'user mode' ones (twits), but thankfully a generic 'global' PCL one from Xerox works OK.

I suspect some of the Print-to-PDF drivers mentioned as as working fine in XP may have come unstuck in a similar way.