The new windows 7 RC has a cool feature called Virtual XP. Under the surfice this is just a more integrated version of windows virtual PC. One of the things that sparkeled my interest was the promise it could redirect USB devices. This would be very usefull for running old legacy hardware.

In order to run virtual XP the computer must support hardware assisted virtualization. So I checked my labtop, the CPU did support it but the bios did not had an option to turn it on. After some research I found a hack to patch the bios. (see here..) It was a bit scary to run the patch but it worked.

So first I played around a bit on the virtual XP. This worked as expected, next I tried to installed an olde Dymo 320 label printer. Whatever I tried I could not get it to work. Next  I tried to use a SPC/USB adapter, at first this seems to work better, inside the XP VM it asked for the driver, it let it install but then it failed to start the driver. So unfortunatelly the virtuallization of the USB devices is not yet working as expected.

Still its very usefull to have a virtual XP on board.

I also created a new virtual machine and loaded ubuntu linux in it. This is working but I did not had the time to look in more detail.