Member Avatar for Siberian

How can you get Hardware that only has drivers in 32-bit to run in a x64 bit Windows environment ? I'd prefer not to dual boot as well as I'm not keen on running a virtual Windows x32. Anyone have any suggestions ?

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Member Avatar for sennetor

Hi Siberian,
I've been running Vista 64Bit for about a year now and I've hit the problem several times.
The bottom line is that 32Bit drivers will not run natively within the 64bit environment.
Every piece of hardware you install in windows is given an address range each defined by the device and driver.

A 32Bit environment has 4Gb of address space & each driver that loads will take a chunk of that space. Anything that is left over is then assigned to the system memory...incidently thats also why 4Gb of memory in a 32Bit OS always seems a few MBs short since the device drivers have gotten the first few addresses.

A 32bit driver cannot be assigned to a 64bit address and needs re-written to 'understand' the new address scheme. Kind of like telling your local postie that your neighbour hood has decided to switch to a binary address scheme- that would cause a few laughs.(I'm a sad geek)

If your real hardcore you might be able to rewrite the driver yourself or find a 64Bit driver for a similar device & modify the INF file to force it to install.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/32-bit-and-64-bit-Windows-frequently-asked-questions

Member Avatar for Siberian

Thanx for the insight. I don't know how to rewrite a driver :( I know for a fact that there is not a x64 driver for this hardware.

Member Avatar for hughv

What hardware? There may be source somewhere.

Member Avatar for Siberian

What hardware? There may be source somewhere.

It's a scanner, would you like to know the model if you could find ?

i know you said "for a fact " but have you checked here .
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/com...s/default.aspx

I did a search there, the results. Empty :(

Member Avatar for Shade01

Connect the scanner and then let it search for the driver on the net.
I had the same problem with my TV card, but when I let it search for the driver it found one that worked ( my search for the driver was also negative).

Member Avatar for Siberian

I'll try that option as well. Thank you :)

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