[Blazkowicz]

Originally Posted by Entropy

Of course. I have a film scanner that is easily worth more than the rest of the system put together. It's made by a company that divested that part of its business before Vista. Third party solutions do exist for later OSs, but they do not give access to all features, apart from fact that they want to get paid. Since that is the only thing I need the PC for, apart from very occasional other uses, having an additional PC just for gaming would be bizarre, when in reality I would prefer having none at all. Due to MS products wanting to live solitary monopoly lives, even in relation to other MS OS versions, I haven't simply used two OSs on the same box.

if it's connected to USB, you should get it to work with XP in virtualbox, using USB passthrough (slightly tricky to set up but works after that).
you can disable every service and program in XP, use the scanner to write files on a shared folder (another feature from the "non free" edition or extension of virtualbox) so a VM with 256MB ram and no network access would be enough.

got a webcam working this way, just to take one picture of myself

[Entropy]

Update #2.
Summary: Terrible performance under XP. No driver update from AMD since 8.95 that ships on packaged CD. Result reinforced by actual benchmarking results by other users, and ASUS's warning.

Under Windows XP, I noticed that trying to use the 32-bit equivalent to the 64-bit Catalyst 12.3 package Dave Baumann linked to above, the catalyst installer didn't actually install a new driver, only updated HDMI sound and a couple of others. I had to do a manual uninstall of the driver that shipped with the ASUS disk, and then forcibly point XP to the relevant files for it to install. When I checked that XP had, indeed, changed driver, it turned out that the driver in the 12.3 package was the same (8.95) with the creation date as the the one shipped on the ASUS disk, without being tagged with the ASUS name, thus making it possible for me to separate the two. Performance, as expected was identical between the two versions.

So - The HD7770 shows very different behaviour under WinXP than under Win7. ASUS was apparently aware of this, and warns customers about it, saying that drivers will be forthcoming in April.
All HD7770 scores in the FutureMark database shows worse performance than is possible under Win7, so the issue is not unique to me - in fact there is no WinXP score that is anywhere near a low end Win7 score so the low performance under XP seems universal.
AMD does not refer to any XP-drivers for the cards in their drop down driver support menus. There is a driver package available, but it contains the same driver that the card shipped with. No update has been made since the introduction of the card, and there is no indication from AMD that any change is forthcoming.

[Malo]

I really can't fault AMD for not focusing let alone creating a XP package for the 7770, let alone anything in this and the previous generation. They shouldn't even bother trying. If they have a driver that works, even if its performance sucks, then I think you're doing well.

[silent_guy]

Microsoft is planning to stop mainstream update support for XP soon. I'm surprised AMD even bothered to create XP drivers for their new cards.

[Blazkowicz]

a significant number of users don't know better, they don't know that the graphics card they buy to replace their 9500GS is supposed to be too recent for the XP they have had since they asked a friend to install it over Vista.
these users typically run the driver provided on CD (whereas I would throw it away with the box)

this is potentially a market of millions users, so AMD would surely make sure to provide a minimal effort driver to avoid bad press.

XP will get updates till april 8, 2014. "soon" means two years which is quite a bit of time.

[Dave Baumann]

Sorry, Cat 12.4 contains XP support. They should be available now.

[CarstenS]

Indeed, look what I found:

AMD683D.1 = "AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series"
AMD683F.1 = "AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series"

[Entropy]

Originally Posted by Dave Baumann

Sorry, Cat 12.4 contains XP support. They should be available now.

Thanks.

[Davros]

have you tested them ?

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Entropy

Of course. I have a film scanner that is easily worth more than the rest of the system put together. It's made by a company that divested that part of its business before Vista. Third party solutions do exist for later OSs, but they do not give access to all features, apart from fact that they want to get paid. Since that is the only thing I need the PC for, apart from very occasional other uses, having an additional PC just for gaming would be bizarre, when in reality I would prefer having none at all. Due to MS products wanting to live solitary monopoly lives, even in relation to other MS OS versions, I haven't simply used two OSs on the same box.

Let me add my own thrill to Blazkowicz's over discovering that I could run my old flatbed scanner on Win 7 x64 via Virtualbox+XP. It works really well. It's free.