Hi everybody! I'd like some advice please... I seem to have three basic choices on taking boxcarloads of VHS and turning them digital here at home, all because of the older but reliable USB video capture device that I've got (whose vendor is gone, and for which I haven't found Vista or Win 7 drivers). As this is not the only piece of XP software I need to keep going, I either:

1. rebuild another XP machine to run these on, and file share on my LAN
2. take either of two reasonably new laptops running Windows 7, and teach them to run XP Virtual Mode
3. again with the laptops, but make them dual bootable with an XP partition

My old HP Media Center machine had 2Gb RAM on it, and the transfers worked fine; but when it burned up its 3d hard drive (drove it in to SMART death), I said enough with it. I tried running it on another old XP machine that only has 768MB RAM on it, and I have unacceptable frame drop on the captures; did not have this on the 2GB machine prior to its toasting itself into oblivion. So, I need bigger machine and memory...

But I have two laptops, a Dell Studio 32bit Win 7 system with 3GB, and a Sony Viao 64 bit with 4GB. I don't have any idea how much of a memory hog the virtual machine mode is, and I don't know if either laptop has the HAL built in to it (but it seems this is no longer required for it to run VXP, but it may affect performance.)


I see the tradeoffs as follows:

1. 1. Probably straightforward, but it does become yet another computer to maintain
   2. XP Virtual mode does make file transfers between systems easy, its USB management seems to suggest that the only XP drivers needed are what I'd load for the device(s) I need to carry on using, and it seems easy to install; but what's the processor and memory overhead I'll experience?
   3. Drivers. I've read posts in the Mobile Computing forum that some folks have had real fits trying to find XP drivers for VISTA generation laptops. I haven't looked yet.

Any thoughts, advice, experience, greatly appreciated! Any other traps I need to look at?

(And yes, there is option 4, spend 60 bucks or so and buy a current generation video capture USB device that comes with windows 7 drivers.... if I could find one with a time base corrector in it for that price I just might!)

Thanks!

I'm tired of that option, but thanks..

As mentioned, this machine runs hot. It has cooked too many drives (3) on me already, which has caused me days of lost time and file recovery, as well as lost work. It has other heat - related issues that just do not make it a worthwhile variation on option 1, rebuild a different, better, cooler XP box.