I have this great old scanner made by Logitech that worked under Windows 98. I want it to work with Windows XP. Unfortunately, Logitech sold their scanner division to a company that went bankrupt in 98. No XP drivers. There are no third party drivers written for this unit. So I’m wondering if I could install a Windows 98 emulator on my Windows XP machine and run the old Windows 98 driver with it. I realize this is a real long shot, but are there any Windows 98 emulators that access the hardware in the proper way in order to run an old driver? The scanner is the Logitech “Freescan”.
Alternatively, I’d be willing to learn how to write a driver but I have no idea how how difficult it is, where to begin, and I don’t think I have the right tools for the job.
It’s possible, depending on your patience level. What I would do is this:
[ol]
[li]Download VMware Server 1.0.8.[/li][li]Create a new virtual machine (VM), giving sufficient resources to run Windows 98 (probably 256 MB RAM, 6 GB hard drive).[/li][li]Install Windows 98 on the VM.[/li][li]Edit the VM settings to map Windows XP’s parallel port to your VM.[/li][li]Try installing the scanner driver in the VM.[/li][/ol]
There are other free virtualization products (such as VirtualBox), but I’m not as familiar with those.
I would recommend having a second machine running win98se.
I have a scanner and printer which work much better with win98se so I have one machine running win98se and use it for that and other tasks. I have grown so accustomed to having several machines that I would have a hard time adapting to having only one. Running several machines provides a lot of redundancy / duplication / safety / convenience, etc. I can have one machine doing one thing while I am doing something else on another machine. If one machine has a problem I can use the other one to download drivers, patches or just to continue with my own things while I fix the problem. Right now on my desk I have my laptop, a desktop running XP-pro and a desktop running win98se. Under my desk is a desktop awaiting repair (procrastinator that I am). In the kitchen is a mini-ITX I am working on. All networked, obviously.
Yup, machines which people throw away can run win98se perfectly and do all sorts of basic stuff. People find them insufficient because they load them with crap (antivirus being #1 crap). If you do not need high power for games then you can use computers which most people would consider junk. I am even running some 400 Mhz computers and they do fine for basic word processing, spreadsheet, internet, etc. A lot of the time I am doing remote desktop to my main computer.