I recently got a 4GB upgrade for my Inspiron XPS M1710 laptop and decided to reformat it and install Vista 64 Ultimate. I am very happy, the OS feels a lot snappier than Vista 32. Most everything I use runs fine and faster. The only device for which I was unable to find drivers was for a Franklin Wireless CDU-550 USB card.
To get it to work under Vista 64, this is what I did:
- Set up a simple Virtual Machine using VMWare player and install Windows XP Pro SP2 on it with 256MB RAM (more than enough).
- Set the USB options of the VM so that it will get assigned a USB device whenever it has focus.
- Insert my Franklin USB card (while the VM has focus) and configure it under XP inside the VM using standard 32 bit drivers.
- Set the VM for host only networking.
- Enable and configure Internet Connection Sharing in the VM
- Set the VMWare virtual network adapter in the host machine to use DHCP.
Voila, now I have a working Internet connection from Vista x64 through the VM. At a cost of 256 MB RAM and a bit of a hassle when I use broadband. I cannot feel any difference in performance at all as the VM is mostly idling all the time and 256MB out of 4GB is not that big a deal.
Next up: Configuring Vista x64 on a 10GB RAM Mac Pro (Quad Core Dual Xenon) which should arrive within a month….
2 comentarios:
Do you see the full 4GB in your BIOS or does it use some bit for devices? I have 4GB as well but even in the BIOS it shows 4GB but usable only 3326 MB. I have Vista x64 Ultimate as well, and that too shows 3326 inside.
Wow, what a beautiful, yet totally impractical hack! I found this while looking for USB wireless cards that support x64 Vista (really x64 Windows 2008). I think I'll look for a different solution but this really amused me.
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