Just a quick one. My plotter (Silhouette Portrait V1) is refusing to work under Windows 10, unless I spend about an hour hot plugging it until it finally works. This is a known issue, and there is a firmware update, but it takes about an hour of hot plugging it to get it to detect, and then the firmware update tells you to turn it off and on again, which disconnects the effing thing and it won't come back. By the time I get it back the firmware update fails. I need to install Windows 7, but my PC is quite complex (RAID array etc and I don't want to mess it up). If I install VMware 15 workstation or whatever the heck it is called and install Win 7 to a VM can I then access the plotter ? It's 100% a Win 10 issue, and I have dodged it for ages but I need lots of cutting templates for this mac project of mine so it is grating badly. I will probably try it any way, but any tips on directly accessing like, hardware from within VMware would be great. I can then either flash the firmware, or, if that still doesn't work just install my tools in the VM of Win 7 and just bloody do my work from there. Thanks guys !
Workstation's USB passthrough is the most reliable IME. I've had issues with Virtualbox, and Hyper-V didn't do it at all last time I used it.
I haven't used VMware in a hot year tbh. I mean, I knew it worked really well, but USB and Windows never really entered the equation, especially older versions of Windows. It was always OSX and Linux I played with. But yeah, maybe this will help others. IE - when Windows 10 breaks your devices just whack on a VM of an older OS it works in and boshty. I did have issues at first. Then I realised you need to hot plug the USB device at which point VMware gives you the choice of putting it in there or leaving it on the host OS. Very slick, and I am very, very happy. Forking out another £200 just to cut accurate templates whenever I do a mod wasn't really something I wanted to entertain.
