A while back I had heard about a program called VirtualBox (virtualbox.org) which is free from Oracle - a well respected name. The program allows you to cross platform almost any operating system on any other OS.
Yesterday I installed this on my Win7 machine and then placed an XP OS in the VirtualBox. You can, if you want, actually flip back and forth at will between the two different (or more) OS's, but I don't suggest that unless you have gobs of RAM. Basically you have 2 or more computers in one box.
The installation went smooth as can be - but (heaven forbid) I did read the instructions first.
I'm posting this under surveying so all can see it since so many of our old software packages will not run on Win7. This seems to be a very good option to the Microsoft Windows XP emulator because it's free and it will run on Win7 Home versions.
As I understand it, the Windows emulator only works with Win 7 Pro...Is this correct?
Yes
I'm running VirtualBox on a couple of machines, and have a variety of OS's running successfully for a variety of projects and testing, such as Ubuntu Linux running under Windows - I even have a testing copy of ArcGIS Server 10 running successfully on Windows Server 2008 inside VirtualBox on an XP machine. They all perform well, but yes, be sure to have plenty of memory handy.
About the only OS I have ever had trouble with inside VirtualBox is any flavor of Mac OSX.
Expensive equipment hard-wired to old software is scary ...
Some 15 years ago while at the University of New Orleans I had a number of photogrammetric instruments that were hard-wired to PDP-11/45 machines running RSX-11M+ and got all of them swapped over to a VAX cluster. Thought it was a good idea at the time ... then Digital Computer Corp tanked.
I recall seeing advertisements about multi-million dollar machinery that continue to run on old legacy mini computers with ancient software. Too much chance of error to change anything, so they keep repairing the computers. Some companies specialize in rebuilding PDP computer parts, etc.
Some things about technology on the march are nice, some ain't considering the investment in time and money to get stuff integrated into your production stream.
VMware Player works great on Win7 and is also free.
Expensive equipment hard-wired to old software is scary ...
A lot of early GIS systems were effectively 'hard wired' too. ERDAS and ESRI both provided versions of their software that would run only on specific hardware configurations. We had VAX/VMS versions of ArcGIS that were so tightly coded to the peripherals (mainly digitizing tables and storage devices) that they were sold as an integrated hardware/software package.
I once showed up at a new job to find a CP/M system running a very early version of ERDAS (the pre-pre Imagine days). I had never seen that particular configuration before. You couldn't so much as swap out an 8" floppy drive module without calling the support guys at ERDAS.
However, if you think everything eventually comes to an end just go out to Monster.com and check the listings for COBOL programmers!
Try this
Try Sentinel System Driver by Rainbow Industries (it's a free download). It allowed me to run an old TDS dongle for Survey Link. TDS told me to find an old XP machine as they don't support their older stuff .... it should let you run anything 32 bit on a 64 bit. Had it for 9 months now with no problems. Should fix it for you.
-JD-