[Knitebane]

Windows doesn’t know if it’s running virtual or real. But depending on your virtualization that’s going to keep a lot of hardware away from it. I work everyday with faxboards that Windows cannot see in any virtual environment, tried them all and none of them pass the existence of those boards through to a virtual Windows.

The faxboard issue is well documented on the VMWare and VirtualBox forums. Basically, it's not really a modem, it's a winmodem and the expects the host OS to provide most of the processing power. The guest OS tries to load it up and starts contention with the host OS.

Network adapters are not the same. To my knowledge there are no Windows network cards. They all work the same, thus they are presented to a real OS and a guest OS exactly the same.

If one OS can't see the hardware, but another OS can, then it's the OS that's the problem.

[boogerbear]

Nope it’s not a winmodem, and the faxboards I’m working with provide most of their own processing power, heck some of them even have cooling fans. Problem is the virtual software doesn’t actually pass all hardware through to the virtualized OS.

Never ever under any circumstances test hardware in virtual and think the test has even the slightest meaning. Simple rule, virtualization makes hardware access just different enough to completely invalidate the testing.