Win 7 64 bit System

[George M. Perzel]

Hi gang;
Need some help from you computer gurus...
I have a Mercury Laserpro unit which I have been driving with a 32 bit computer using CorelDraw and XP.
I recently purchased a new computer with Win 7-64 bit.There is no 64 bit driver for the Mercury, at least none I could find.
Question: Can I make Corel files on the new system and use the old computer to laser them or will the fact that they were made on a 64 bit system cause a problem?
Appredciate any help -thanks
George
Laserarts

[Mitchell Andrus]

Things may have changed or a driver may now be available, but several years ago I was told to make sure my new laptop was running XP Pro, 32 bit. 64 bit wasn't supported - yet.
.

[Mike Null]

George

Gary Hair has some experience with this. I would send him a pm. I'm pretty sure he can solve the problem.

[Tim Bateson]

...Question: Can I make Corel files on the new system and use the old computer to laser them or will the fact that they were made on a 64 bit system cause a problem?...


Yes there are no issues with that. Only drivers are 32 or 64 bit, not saved files.

[George M. Perzel]

Thanks, Tim and Mike- will send PM to Gary.
George

[Gary Hair]

George,
If you don't have 64 bit drivers for your laser it won't work, period!

But, in your case you can make do with two computers, one for design and the other for running the laser. There is no problem at all with creating a file on a 64 bit system and printing (lasering) from a 32 bit system.

Gary

[Sam Gardner]

Or you could try MS virtual PC xp mode and you have 2 PC's in 1

[George M. Perzel]

Thanks Gary, Sam-
Sam
Great idea but can I run xp mode in 32 bits while Win 7 is 64 bits??
George
Laserarts

[James Terry]

Thanks Gary, Sam-
Sam, Great idea but can I run xp mode in 32 bits while Win 7 is 64 bits??
George Laserarts
On your 64 bit machine, you can run a virtual pc image of any kind, 64/32 bit and any os. You can also choose to run VMWare player and download a lot of images to get you started with many a project.

If your laser is networked, this is even easier.

I havent yet messed with the GCC print driver on a 64 bit OS, but it seems to me that there should be a way to make even the old version work there. But so far everything that I read says otherwise.

There is a 64 bit driver (http://www.litografa.lt/index.php?aid=150) for the Mercury II.

[George M. Perzel]

Thanks, James
I'm gonna try it-hope this is not another one step forward and three steps back, something that seems to happen to me whenever i mess with a working computer.
Will advise progress
Appreciate your help
George
Laserarts

[Lee DeRaud]

I havent yet messed with the GCC print driver on a 64 bit OS, but it seems to me that there should be a way to make even the old version work there.Probably, if by "make it work" you mean "provide that feature in the OS". I'm about 99% sure there's no technical reason Microsoft couldn't have provided a translation layer to handle 32-bit drivers. They probably concluded (correctly IMHO) that the PR hit of orphaning a bunch of device drivers for older hardware was a lot smaller than the PR hit from the compatibility, performance, and security issues caused by such a kludge. (When you extend that logic to applications, obviously you come up with a completely different answer.)

OTOH, I find the whining by hardware manufacturers about the difficulty of coming up with 64-bit drivers to be a bit laughable, as generating a 64-bit driver from a working 32-bit driver is not exactly rocket science. The main problem for small-quantity hardware vendors may be that they didn't write their own 32-bit drivers in the first place: they outsourced the job and it's easier to whine (and tell their customers to use obsolete OSs) than to pay to do it again.