[Matthew Attoe]

Hi,

I've just gotten my MBP, My first notebook and I love it.

I have installed XP via bootcamp and so far everything seems to work fine. Except for one thing.

I work for a Colour Management company and most of our work is done in a program called GMG Colorproof.

Colorproof is USB-dongle protected. I have a legitimate dongle (as we are a UK-based reseller it is a fully-unlocked dongle). But when i plug the dongle in Windows can't find the drivers for it. I have installed the Marx dongle drivers, but then when XP starts loading the drivers when I insert the dongle it fails, saying it can't install the dongle / driver.

These dongles install and run with zero issues on what I would call 100% native XP machines.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this won't work?

Has anyone had any similar issues with hardware dongles?

I didn't buy my MBP to run XP, but now that I can, it would be great to be able to run the one piece of software that I could really do with running.

Any help or advice that you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance for both your time and advice.

Matthew

[mduell]

Have those "100% native XP machines" (whatever that means) been preconfigured by corporate IT?

It sounds like you need to download the driver for the dongle from the company that sold you the dongle.

[ghporter]

It does sound like you need a different driver. This may have nothing to do with the computer being a Mac and everything to do with the fact that the hardware is radically different from a standard PC. USB seems to be handled significantly differently... And dongles are notorious for doing "interesting" things to the rest of the USB system. Have you contacted the software maker? This sounds like a real issue for them.

P.S. I hate dongle-locked software. I'd rather have it call home with an abstract of my hardware every time I start it because of this sort of issue. That's just me...

[Matthew Attoe]

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my questions.

Out of desperation I trashed my windows partition, reinstalled XP, installed the dongle drivers again, installed colorproof and voila, everything works a treat! Result times 10!!

Again, many thanks,

Matthew

[ghporter]

Sometimes a minor issue in a Windows installation does not show up during the installation. It waits until it can mess with you a LOT, and then springs out to harrass you! Obviously your reworking of the Windows partition and installation did the trick. Congrats.