Windows 7: when i try to install step 7 ???

My old laptop crashed for the fourth time in a year so I bought a new laptop. The new laptop came with Windows 7. I upgraded to Windows 7 Pro 64. Then I downloaded the Microsoft Virtual PC and XP Pro. Finally, I loaded Step7, WinCC, Teleservices, and Starter onto the Virtual PC running XP Pro.

There are some quirks mostly relating to my being unfamiliar with a virtual pc. Bottom line is that Step7, WinCC, and Teleservices now operate normally. I have yet to try Starter hooked up to a drive. And, I plan to install ComfortSoft tomorrow and try that.

Mistakes made were many. I downloaded the wrong file the first time when getting the Virtual PC and XP Pro from the MS website. The 32 bit version did not work for me. The 64 bit version did work. It took me several hours to figure out that XP Pro in the virtual machine could not talk with a flash drive, the token, until you told the system that there was a flash drive to connect. I have an old version of Teleservices and it was a trick getting the USB floppy drive connected to upload that token.

I have read that running this set is slow. I will learn more but it seems like it runs the same as before for me with an XP Pro machine. Booting the virtual drive does take about an extra minute and a half on start up, but Windows 7 takes less time than my older XP Pro.

Mark