Today I installed Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2004 SP1 to solve a problem I’ve been having with my printer. There are no Windows XP printer drivers for my Sharp FO-3800M multifunction printer. In order to print anything I’ve had to shut down my computer and put in my removable hard drive with Windows 2000 Professional. This is a time consuming process and interrupts my work.
I had the excellent idea of running Windows 2000 Professional as a virtual machine for printing. This would allow me to run Windows 2000 in a separate window and do my printing from applications within that window. In effect, it gives me at least one program running under Windows XP that can use my printer.
The first step was to use the Virtual Disk Wizard to create a virtual hard drive. Then I had to create a new virtual machine to run Windows 2000 Professional. The next step was to install the operating system using four boot disks on floppy disks and my Windows 2000 Professional CDROM.
I found it difficult to switch from the guest operating system to the host operating system until I read the help file and learned that the right ALT key is used for that purpose. In order for the guest operating system to capture my LPT1 port I had to remove that port from every printer on the host operating system which was acceptable because I could not print anything under Windows XP. The final step is to modify the settings of the virtual machine so that its virtual LPT1 port maps to the physical LPT1 port (see screen shot below). I was able to print a test page successfully. The virtual hard drive is using 2.20 GB of my actual hard drive and exists as one huge file. It can probably be burned to a DVD to preserve the installation of the operating system which is a lengthy process that I don’t want to repeat.
