After the previous set of Windows 7 adventures, I discovered that the box I bought doesn’t support hardware-assisted virtualisation, which is needed for the Virtual XP mode. Option 2 for the scanner: try out a separate application called VueScan, which claims to support a large number of scanners. Except for, this program needs the Canon scanner drivers to first be installed. Which don’t exist. On to the next attempt: install Virtual Box, and put Windows XP on that as a virtual machine. The problem with this was that the USB port kept claiming it was busy, and none of the various tips I found worked. Verdict: I couldn’t find a way to support the Canon 3000F scanner under Windows 7 64-bit, and will have to use my old XP laptop as a scanner driver until I have sufficient motivation to buy a new scanner.
Mind you, installing the virtualbox + Windows XP combo ended up being useful anyway. QuickBooks 2003 installs, but doesn’t run, under Windows 7. I gather that even the latest versions of QuickBooks have issues with Windows 7, so I simply installed the one I have in the Windows XP virtual machine. There was a bit of fiddling involved in moving data around, that involved installing the vbox guest additions and setting up shared folders, but in the end it all worked. I suspect more than a couple of programs will end up in that virtual machine.
Overall, I probably spent close to a week of work time setting up my work environment to be more or less where I was before my old PC died. It’s obvious they borrowed quite a bit from the Mac OS X environment, including hiding some of the useful functions. The menus fading in and out were starting to make me sea-sick until I found out how to turn that off (Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced -> Performance Settings). I’m sure I’ll find more issues as I get more used to the environment, along with more programs that won’t install or work. Fortunately cygwin does work under Windows 7, along with Office 2003 (which I need for client compatability).