Well I've been slowly but surely getting my CNC put together and setup over the last six or so months and I'm getting closer and closer to actually start running, so software is the next step.

Well not knowing what all I might need I put together my own comp and purchased Windows Vista Business X64 and then later upgraded to Windows 7 Business 64, not knowing the incompatibilities of the parallel ports, Mach 3 and the 64 bit systems... oops.  

After spending a day or so trying to get Mach 3 to run correctly under Windows 7 64, to no avail, I started to look at other options short of downgrading to a 32 bit OS (come on, it's 2010 guys... get with it!  LOL ). Well sure enough I was able to come up with something... Windows XP Mode. A virtual visualization of Windows XP that runs in Windows 7. After setting XP Mode up, I reinstalled Mach 3 and ran into zero problems during installation. Ran the driver test, no errors.

So the real question I have is, is this a safe environment or valid option for running Mach 3 on my 64 bit Windows 7 system? I haven't hooked it up to the CNC yet as I am still building and putting everything together, so I wont know if it is actually functioning 100% and wont know for a while.

Anyways, thought I would share as well as get any input for all of you gurus out there.
Later,

HI, I would like to know this as well please. I have just upgraded to Windows 7 64 bit. I could keep my old PC on it's own to solely run Mach 3 but be simpler if I just had the one PC. XP mode sounds like it should be ok. I made sure my new motherboard had the old legacy parallel port 

Yeah everything seems to be functioning fine under XP Mode. I'm going to be playing with it this weekend a lot more when I have more time.

Now the only problem I see (if this does work and Mach is stable running under this "emulated" environment) is that people who are using a 64 bit version of Windows 7 will have to be running Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, or Enterprise to be able to use XP Mode since Microsoft's logic is "This is not a typical consumer thing” and is limiting XP mode to the higher end versions of 7.

So hopefully this will be a workable solution until Mach and the 64 bit systems can be addressed.

this answers a question i posed in another thread.. whether or not Mach will run in a VM.. apparently it will. Good news! Thanks for taking the time to post on it, please give more feedback if you run into bugs, my biggest concern would be that intypical VM applications the PP is shared adn if anyone looked over a network, it would ping the printer port looking for printers that can be shared.. a bit of a concern..

Since i dont have my controller on a network anyhow doesnt bug me.. just watch for it.

Not sure this belong here, but this looks like you might know the answer.   I've set up my virtual xp machine and loaded Mach3 now I'm trying to read files (g code) on another computer on the network.  The real machine is able to get to the files, but not the virtual version.

I'm guessing its a firewall or network setting that's missing.  Any thoughts?

Jim.

What do I have to do in windows to get the xp mode to work?

I found that the XP emulation had poor performance and ended up loading a 32 bit version of windows 7 on the machine as an alternate operation system.  It works flawlessly.

I tried running Mach 3 in Windows XP mode and when I start up the program the VM crashes.  I am able to run the driver test just fine but I just cannot get Mach 3 loaded.

For me the dirver test was not good.  The results seemed to inidcate slow and sometime erradic results.

One thing I did not do in my 64 bit version at home was run all the windows P updates.  I am trying this on my work machine but it is a 32 bit machine so this may be an unfair test, we'll see.