I’ve been running my embroidery machine on Vista for a while, and it’s been fine. Six months ago, my husband bought me a new video card so I could have dual monitors for my desktop. Cool, right? Yep, except that means I need to upgrade that machine to Windows 7. And what didn’t want to play nice on Windows 7? My embroidery machine, of course. I have a Pfaff 2144 that’s updated to a 2170.

The trouble was, I’d plug in the USB cable from the machine to the computer and the computer would tell me that it recognized it as a Pfaff 2144 USB cable, but it didn’t have any drivers for it. I tried all the updates from the Pfaff website. Nothing worked. I tried running the programs in XP compatibility mode as an administrator since that had worked to get it running on Vista before Pfaff provided Vista drivers. No luck.

After fighting with this for the better part of a day, I finally realized that I could run a virtual machine in XP mode on Windows 7. So, I fired up Internet Explorer to go to Microsoft.com and get the Windows Virtual Machine and XP Mode downloads. (Yes, you have to use IE to download stuff from Microsoft. It’s the only purpose for IE on my computer.) I installed XP Mode and the Windows Virtual Machine. Once installed, go to Start/All Programs/Windows Virtual PC and right click and choose “expand.” Once you expand it, you can choose XP mode. It will go through a bunch of steps the first time to create the new virtual environment.

Once that’s done, you’ll need to load the VIP software so you can connect the embroidery machine. Pop in the cd and run it in the virtual XP window. When it gets to the part where you have to insert the dongle, insert it and then at the top of the XP window, click USB and tell it to attach the dongle. It will then run through the auto detection and setup for the dongle. After that finishes, you can finish the installation of the VIP software that was requesting the dongle in the first place.

Install the 3D software the same way. When you connect the USB for the embroidery machine to the computer, you’ll need to go to the USB tab at the top of the XP window again and tell it to attach. Then you’ll be able to get the drivers for the embroidery machine from the 3D software cd.