Windows 7 and MPI interface to S7 PLC (Prolific)

I have had an S7 plc communicating to a Windows 7 machine running Citect 7.2
Just for testing purposes and student projects.

The Proscada demo would run for 2 hours and citect for 15 minutes which was great for what we needed.


But all of a sudden , none of the student's laptops running windows 7 can communicate.
I've tried different drivers , I think I have the latest.

I suspect windows 7 did an update that stuffed our drivers ?
What do you think ?

Running a virtual machine and widows xp we have no problems , but from windows 7 on the same machine that connect via the virtual machine , it's no good

I guess we'll just have to go with virtual machines and Citect 6.2 which seems to work OK.

Could it be some kind of firewall or driver blocking ?
Since the drivers are probably quite old, I guess they are not certified for Win 7.

What is with the "Prolific" in the topic ?

Apart from that, VMs for students sounds as a good solution anyway.
You can easily restore the VM when they have messed it up. And I think it is better than have to tell them dont do this dont do that etc.

Siemens and Windows 7 specially 64 bit are not a good match, as mentioned before: go for VW with XP

Jack

Hi I have a driver that may work for you, I used it on a 3rd party interface before I got the genuine Siemens adaptor

Its too big too too add to the thread so pm me youir email and i will send it. It is about 4.5MB zipped up

Cheers