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Windows 7's XP Mode
I sat on the floor, surrounded by cables, camcorders, and 8mm tapes wondering, "How did I get myself into the mess?" It all started with a burglary and ended with me running Windows XP Mode on my newly upgraded
Windows 7 machine. To tell this tech tale correctly, though, I must backtrack a bit and briefly explain my videography habits.
In 1995, a few months before my son was born, I bought my first camcorder. It was a Hitachi device that recorded to standard 8mm video tape. The video quality was, for the time, excellent, and I could record 2 hours per tape. I used the camcorder to death—literally—and by the time it died, I had amassed dozens of tapes, chronicling my son's first bath, his first steps, the first day of school, first cough, first tantrum, etc. A few years later, my daughter came along and I repeated the same pattern.
Needless to say, I needed to buy a camcorder that could play all those tapes. I bought a nice Sony digital model. The DCR-TRV730 recorded higher-quality video and sound, though I could now only fit an hour of video on a tape. Once again, my tape library began to grow. When I purchased my new Sony computer (also about 7 years ago), I immediately started using it to capture, convert, and burn my tapes to DVD (a tale I chronicled). Despite the fact that I could hook the camera up to the Pc via FireWire and control playback, recording, rewinding, etc. from the computer, conversion was a time-consuming process. Years later, I had a fair number of DVDs but far more tapes that still needed burning. Worse yet, I discovered that some of the initial DVDs I burned were corrupted (Never buy cheap media!).
When I got my new HP Pavilion 9060n a couple of years ago, I started doing a bit more DVD burning. Unfortunately, I had even less time than ever to get the task done. Then, a year ago, someone burglarized my home and, among other things, took my Sony camcorder, leaving me without a way to play my 8mm tapes.
Over the next year, I kept looking at Sony 8mm deck players. They can run a couple hundred dollars, which isn't terrible, but I never pulled the trigger. Then I found a Sony camcorder at a garage sale for $5. It was older than the one I had (and considerably dirtier), and it was missing a charger. I bought it anyway. I realized it used a proprietary charger (thanks, Sony), so I borrowed one from Personal computer Labs. I found that while I could play the tape someone left inside the camcorder, I couldn't play a digital video. Plus, there was no FireWire-out port, just composite and S-video. I'm not sure what I was expecting for $5. In any case, I put that camcorder aside and decided to look on eBay again and see if I could find a working Sony digital camcorder.
I found a DCR-TRV140 Digital 8, which the seller said could play 8mm and Hi8 tapes and had the necessary FireWire port. And yes, I paid considerably more than $5. When it arrived at my home, I grabbed a tape that was recorded with the old Hitachi. It wouldn't play. Eventually, I discovered that this Sony camcorder could only play digital video—only tapes recorded with my stolen Sony camcorder. This was a bit of good news. I then realized that the $5 camcorder I had bought at the garage sale was not broken. It just couldn't handle digital tapes. It would, however, play all my old Hitachi analog recordings.
I felt like I was getting closer to a solution.
A new Hurdle
Now I had two camcorders,
Office Ultimate 2007 Key, a ton of 8mm tapes, as well as a 64-bit
Windows 7-based Computer, with the horsepower (3GB RAM, a 3-GHz quad-core CPU, 512MB video memory, plus a dual-layer DVD burner) to capture and burn as many DVDs as I needed. I decided to start with my newer tapes and the DCR-TRV140. I found a FireWire cable, connected the camcorder to the Pc, booted up Adobe Premiere Elements 8, and then spent the next frustrating 45 minutes trying to get the system to see my camcorder. Turns out that this camcorder, while new enough to read digital tapes, was just old enough to lack support for 64-bit
Windows 7 (and Sony appears to have no plans to add support for the 64-bit OS). Had I stuck with a 32-bit operating system,
Genuine Office 2010, I might not have had this problem. Microsoft and its partners might want to do a bit more outreach with consumers about all they might lose when they make the switch to 64-bits (or are pushed—more and more systems come with the 64-bit OS by default).
Undaunted, I decided to give the Sony analog camcorder a attempt. Without a video capture card, I needed to use an external capture device. Fortunately, I had an ADS Tech DVD Xpress on hand. It's a great little device that takes video from camcorders and VCRs, converts it into a digital format, and delivers it to your Laptop. I installed the software, but, as with the Sony digital camcorder, my
Windows 7 Personal computer couldn't see it.
This all brings me back to where we started—me sitting on the floor surrounded by camcorders, 8mmm tapes, cables, and other peripheral devices, trying to figure out what to do next. Crying seemed like a decent option, but I decided to do something more constructive.
A fresh Approach
Somehow,
Windows 7 32bit, I'd managed to amass a collection of hardware and tapes that needed an old-school solution: It was time to attempt
Windows 7's Windows XP Mode. XP Mode is a virtual Windows XP system running inside
Windows 7. It's supported by
Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate. The beauty of this virtualization trick is that you can run hardware and software that's no longer supported by
Windows 7 (32 or 64 bit).
When Ed Mendelson took XP Mode for a spin last spring[[link: 239954]], he wasn't that impressed. Obviously, I had some trepidation about installing it on my machine. However, my desire to save my family's video memories overrode any concerns.
As noted in other stories, XP Mode doesn't simply run on any PC—in fact, some can't run it at all. Mine isn't one of those PCs, but I did have to enable virtualization before I could install XP Mode. Doing so required a BIOS change—not difficult to do, but anytime you mess with the BIOS, it's a bit scary.
I found the instructions for updating my HP system's BIOS (hitting the Esc key during startup gave me accessibility to a menu where F10 opened the BIOS configuration). Once inside, I turned on Virtualization Technology and then rebooted my system.
Windows XP Mode is supported by
Windows 7, but it doesn't ship with the OS. After I updated my system, I still had to download Windows XP Mode first and Windows Virtual Personal computer second. In addition,
Windows 7 had to install a couple of unnamed updates to make virtualization work. One other quirk is that XP Mode forced me to create a user name and password—not a big deal though I found it odd that it set the username as "XPMUser" and would not let me edit it. The set-up also instructed me to enable sharing for some of my drives.
With all of that done,
Microsoft Office 2007 Pro, I was ready to launch XP Mode. As I expected, it's really a virtual XP system with, by default, only 512MB of my system's 3GB of RAM at its disposal. The screen reminds me a bit of when I used to do remote access. It looks exactly like my old Windows XP screen, but under Start, a couple of key options are missing. Instead of Shut Down or Sleep, there's only Log-off, which exits you out of XP Mode. As is Windows' nature, a message popped up that Windows XP wasn't secure and I should install security software. I'm already running Norton Internet Security 2010 in
Windows 7, so I ignored this message.
Similarly, XP Mode doesn't see any of your system's software, so I had to install a brand new video editing application—I went with a previous version of Adobe Premiere Elements (version 3) so as not to tax the system too much.
So far, so good. But running a virtual system also means you have to more or less invite your system ports to work with it. Essentially, XP Mode asks you to mount and unmount ports and drives. I installed the ADS Tech DVD Xpress device under Windows XP Mode, which went smoothly. Then I had to turn on the USB drive to see the actual device.
Back in Business, Sort of
As promised, XP Mode did recognize the DVD Xpress capture device connected to it and, when I connected my analog Sony camcorder to the device via an S-video and audio cable, I was able to play my video on the computer screen and, eventually, capture the file.
Once I had the 8-GB file captured and stored on my C: Drive, I couldn't fine anyway to accessibility that same file on the
Windows 7 environment. Finally I mounted the HP pocket drive in my system under XP mode, copied the file to that drive and found I could then unmount the drive and entry it under
Windows 7. Once back in
Windows 7, I burned the DVD video to a dual-layer DVD.
I had what I consider half a solution. Things did not go so smoothly when I tried connecting my Sony digital camcorder directly to my Pc. The digital camcorder has, as noted earlier, a FireWire port. I loaded up XP Mode, connected my camcorder to the IEEE 1394 port on the front of my computer, and learned, in very short order, that Virtual Laptop has no FireWire support. The only good news is that I know I can connect the digital camcorder to the ADS Tech device via S-video—while in XP Mode,
Windows 7 Ultimate Product Key, of course. Still, this wasn't exactly the outcome I was hoping for. My next possible option is to create a dual-boot system, but I don't have the energy left for that right now.
So, again, I ask, how did I get myself into this mess?
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Windows 7 Adventures with Windows 7's XP Mode La
Linear Mode
