Chromatography Forum

Is it possible to run windows 98 within virtualbox as a guest OS in windows 7 and run windows 98 compatible version of software to control the instrument. Just worried if the windows 98 will have proper control over the interface card being as guest OS to control instrument.

In my experience, no, it doesn't work. My application was trying to run a Nicolet FTIR using an old version of Omnic (5.1) that only runs under Win98. I could not control the Nicolet interface card running Win98 in a virtual environment on a WinXP box.

Another approach is a multi-boot system that will boot Win98 or Win7, depending on your need.

No special interface cards are supported in a virtualized environment. In rare lucky cases RS232 may work.

If your problem is that you want windows 7 for networking/modern software, and win 98 for an old instrument whose software won't run on modern versions of windows, the easiest solution is to find a modern win 7 computer, fit it with a second network card, and interface this to the old win98 machine. You can then leave the old machine permanently in win 98 world where it will be happy, and transfer data etc. via your new "interface" computer, which can run all the up-to-date virus-checker things, and do all the modern stuff that networking requires, while protecting the older pc from disaster.

You can hook up several old instruments to a single "interface" PC if desired.

And another alternative is a KVM switch and a shared network drive for both machines.

I managed to run my Windows 3.x based Lloyds software and Minolta colour spectrophotometer Windows 2000 based software in Win7 using VMware player (all free to boot). Both machines connect via RS232 and it did take some fiddling around with settings until we got it to work. The hardest thing was working out how to export the files back into the Win 7 software but got there in the end.