virtualbox.org

I've got this big ol' expensive printer here, and the company that made it have seen fit to ignore that Windows 7 is pretty widely used, and not develop a driver for it. Using XP for the actual machine is not going to happen, for reasons to catastrophically boring to explain. My solution is to install XP in a virtual machine, and print automatically from images dropped in a certain location in a shared folder, or something equally enlightened.

My problem, however, is that as the device is unrecognised in W7, I can't select it for filtering(?) to the XP VM.

Much googling on the subject reveals this is a problem with the recent versions of Virtualbox, so I downgraded to 4.0.x, where the problem remains, contradicting whichever forum post I saw.

And now, for delicious screenshots.

imgur dot com/a/TCG68

(That's pretty annoying, of course I want to post a link to screenshots on my first visit, it's why I'm here).

This is with 4.0.16, but the results are identical in the latest version, which I had before.

Thank you for your time.

EDIT: Yes, I've had the extension pack installed both times. Forgot to mention.

You can post screenshots as attachments even on your first message.

I'm sure we've had people with your scenario before: the fact that there are no drivers for the device should not prevent the USB subsystem from picking it up, nor prevent the device being selectable by filters.

I messed about with filters for a fair while, and eventually, just set a catch-all blank one, 'cause I have a PS/2 mouse and keyboard.

This, I think, means that I have to, at the beginning of every day, unplug the printer that didn't work, start the PC, wait for all the stuff to start up for W7, then launch the VM, then plug in the printer that isn't recognised.

If you could provide a way round this, that'd be pretty sweet, but if not, this works, and that's the prime concern.

Thank you for your attention.