How workable is Vista?

As a last resort, try *.html then *.doc. No guarantee, of course!

The most common cause for such big word files is pictures. .doc format doesn't seem to be able to store pictures in jpg - it uses a sort of mangled raw bitmap that can't be well compressed by external programs (such as zip).

I've only tried hardware access using Virtual Box - access to a USB dongle, a USB debugger, and a USB flash memory device (a good guinea pig for testing) worked perfectly, with XP and Kubuntu hosts.

I haven't tried using the parallel port with Virtual Box - according to the developers (now at Sun), theoretically it might work, but there are no guarantees.

Not really. Nearly all my reports and module specs contain half a dozen pictures or more. Scope plots, photos, schematics, layout sections, the works. The files size rarely gets above 1.5MB and most of them are north of 25 pages. I format any tech drawings in PNG, then import them. Images in JPEG. Keeps things rather tiny.

Tried it. Lost lots of detail in the pics and was then not restoreable to Word-97 compatible format (which is a requirement with most of my clients).

I believe you can do the reversal, but it won't make it smaller! However, IF IRC there is an option somewhere that allows you to discard the retained previous states when saving. Using it makes saving a longer process - whee. I virtually never use word (I stick to text files to all purposes) so I don't really know.

I am currently running an old version of Ultiboard under VMware with W98 guest OS because that version of Ultiboard will not run on XP. This version uses a hardware key on the parallel port and that works fine.

We did try the XP VM first, but it crashed irrepairably after trying to run fullscreen with Ultiboard repeatedly and on different systems.

In my experience, devices that enumerate as a standard COM or LPT device seem to work okay (probably because they really are just a USB- to-RS232 or USB-to-Centronics shim bolted onto an existing emulator design).

Devices that use totally proprietary drivers - I'm looking at you, Texas Instruments and Xilinx - don't seem to work. The Xilinx tool that came with the ML403 kinda worked, very unreliably and slowly. The MSP430 stuff either just doesn't work (when virtualized under Windows) or crashes the host OS hard with a kernel panic (MacOS). Doesn't seem to matter whose emulation software is being used either.

Discard previous states? That would be great to know because it'll get rid of meta-data. AFAIK only a brand new version of Word can do that via some helper routine. OpenOffice can't do it either as far as I know.

Virtual Box and VMWare differ greatly in the way they handle these devices. VMWare lets the guest access the host's USB devices - but only if the *host* has drivers for them. Virtual Box will pass it straight through to the guest - the host drivers are not involved. When running some development software on a XP guest on a Linux host, the software had no problem accessing the dongle without any support on the Linux side (I don't know if there *are* Linux drivers for that dongle).

I don't know about the state of parallel port access from Virtual Box.

If you are having trouble with VMWare, or haven't got any virtualisation software from before, give Virtual Box a try. It's free (there's an open source version which is "speech" free, and a closed source version which is "beer" free for almost all uses), and works well. It doesn't have the same sophisticated management tools as VMWare, but you don't need that on a desktop.

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I've tried VMWare and Parallels and Virtual PC. I'm not sure if what you just said there is completely true, btw. I have devices that are totally custom and have no native drivers, and both VMWare and Parallels virtualize the _USB controller_ so that the driver in the emulated VM can talk to the device attached to the host.

I don't see any way that these emulators could virtualize abstracted access to a device that doesn't have a generic interface.

My understanding of VMWare's USB must be either mistaken, out of date, or vary according to the product (I've only tried the server version, not the desktop version, although the desktop version would be more appropriate here).

I note your list of tested solutions is missing Virtual Box...

There are plenty of USB device classes that *do* have a generic interface. Thus it is quite possible to virtualise mice, keyboards, flash disks, etc., without having full transparent USB support. I don't know if any of the virtualisation solutions do that (since I clearly know a little less than I thought I did, at least about VMWare).

There's an NSA paper on how to do this in various software packages. Different aim entirely (secrecy) but the results are the same. Do a web search for "Redacting with Confidence". Don't have a link handy right now.

Well, I don't know - the effects I observe are consistent with the controller being virtualized, put it that way (i.e. I can install drivers in the guest operating system without the host OS seeing anything but "unknown device attached").

You should also note that XP is installing inside Virtual Box in the window behind this browser :) Thanks for the pointer, now let's see if it works.

Sure. Anything for which a class driver exists should be virtualizable. My point is that the custom devices - which is most of my USB JTAG adapters, emulator pods, etc - do not have a class device and it is not clear to me how they could be virtualized.

Try Tools -> Options -> Save. Uncheck "Allow to save quickly" (or something like that, I am translating from the Spanish 2002 version)

I don't use Word except under duress. I'm mostly interested in handling program source files and compiling them. The results are sent back to a non-PC primary machine for most of the rest of the work.

A major thing I miss is a simple "print" command. This has been removed/disabled in the recent M$ offerings. I find it a major pain to have to fire up a word processor just to be able to print a simple ASCII file.

Curiosity item: Does anyone know what the internal API is for the various flavors of Windows for printing? Does the API expect the text to be simple ASCII, Postscript, or what?

What happens when you select all, copy to clipbard, shut down Word, restart Word, create a new blank Word document, and paste the saced information into it?

It only has the auto-recovery option. But the meta-data is inside the file and that's what makes the Word format not suitable for exchange in a biz enfironment. MS has issued some kind of helper routine that scrubs this stuff but it won't work on older versions.

Well, yeah, that's how it's done. But now you have to repeat a lot of formatting such as margins, footers, page count, page numbers etc. Quite cumbersome.