Windows 7 ridiculously specialized question.

[PattyBoom]

or maybe not; as you can see i am n00bin it up over here. I just got and installed win7 on my laptop. so far so good, except i originally had problems with the system recognizing my video card and using direct3d. i downloaded the drivers for my card, and then reinstalled directx and things seemed to be working fine.

until i started messing around with this xp virtual machine. I may be doing something simply stupid but this is what i am trying to accomplish:

i need to be able to open an xp specific program called midiOX (midiYoke) in order to enable my laptop to communicate to all of my midi devices. when i try to run it it gives me the same "cannot use direct3d please install directx" error. now how does the xp virtual machine (which i installed after figuring out what was originally wrong with my direct3d settings) not recognize my video card/settings from 7? do i have to install drivers for xp in the virtual environment? i did that and it gave me an error for trying to install xp drivers on a win7 machine.

also, after all that gets sorted out, as i understand it the next time i use midiOX in win7 it will automatically launch the xp virtual machine to run the program without me having to set it all up each time correct? willikers.


i just want to make my jazz mutant lemur talk to my computer. so frustrating, almost ready to throw this thing in a gutter and just go get a mac that has built in midi daemon recognition; please advise.


thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

 

[busydog]

or maybe not; as you can see i am n00bin it up over here. I just got and installed win7 on my laptop. so far so good, except i originally had problems with the system recognizing my video card and using direct3d. i downloaded the drivers for my card, and then reinstalled directx and things seemed to be working fine.

until i started messing around with this xp virtual machine. I may be doing something simply stupid but this is what i am trying to accomplish:

i need to be able to open an xp specific program called midiOX (midiYoke) in order to enable my laptop to communicate to all of my midi devices. when i try to run it it gives me the same "cannot use direct3d please install directx" error. now how does the xp virtual machine (which i installed after figuring out what was originally wrong with my direct3d settings) not recognize my video card/settings from 7? do i have to install drivers for xp in the virtual environment? i did that and it gave me an error for trying to install xp drivers on a win7 machine.

also, after all that gets sorted out, as i understand it the next time i use midiOX in win7 it will automatically launch the xp virtual machine to run the program without me having to set it all up each time correct? willikers.


i just want to make my jazz mutant lemur talk to my computer. so frustrating, almost ready to throw this thing in a gutter and just go get a mac that has built in midi daemon recognition; please advise.


thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

I'd set up a dual-boot Win7/XP Box. Plenty of instructions in this forum and on the internet on how to do that.

 

[PattyBoom]

so are you telling me that this xp virtual machine is worthless? ... (smoke from ears) or is there a more entrenched reason that you suggest that?

 

[Joe S]

If don't want to do the dual boot and you have a copy of XP you can use VMware Player http://downloads.vmware.com/d/ It's free and now you can create a VM there. I was never impressed with the free virtual VMs MS offered before. I only tried XP Mode for a short time before dumping it since I have VM Workstation. There is also Sun's Virtualbox but it's a royal pain to network and share on.
Joe

 

[Radenight]

Anything being run in a virtual environment is useless in my opinion.. I understand all the pros of it but I just can't ever bring myself to use it for anything other then testing purposes.. I would also suggest going with the dual-boot option if you still need Windows XP that bad..

 

[Joe S]

The biggest thing with a VM is to have a host that is top end. My windows 7 is 64 bit with 8 G ram and a quad core processor. The XP VM is actually faster than my old dell with 1 G ram and a 2.0 pentium 4 processor. I've edited pics,video, converted video and audio. Usually using apps that weren't 64 bit compatible or didn't work on Vista pr Windows 7.
As an experiment I did load VMware player on my old Dell 8200 and try Windows 7 Home Edition it did run but it was slow. I didn't do more than a quick test loading antivirus. Just my off hand observation but I think a host should have a min if 4G ram to make a guest run decent.
Adding XP after Windows 7 can be a bit of a problem to get all of the kinks worked out with boot manager and all.
Joe