Tech 2 with MAC and Windows XP emulation

Question:
I have VMWare fusion on my Mac laptop to run Windows XP. Can I use a USB to serial adapter cable to be able to use the Tech2 Security functions?
Answer:
Funny you should ask - I did this exact thing earlier tonight, on my Macbook Pro running XP in VirtualBox. From my experience VMWare's USB support is superior to VirtualBoxes, so I imagine it should be even easier with that host.

Make sure you use a good serial adapter. I used a Keyspan that has always worked great for me (and other people have reported success with as well).

I was using TIS 2000 since I have a 2001 9-3 that does not require Global TIS - I don't see why it would be any different though.

The only hiccup I had was in configuring the port in the guest OS. There are a couple of theoretical ways to go about it; in the end what I did was just map the USB device to the guest directly, so it showed up as a new USB device in XP. Then I installed drivers for the keyspan adapter in XP, and everything went smoothly.

Theoretically you could install drivers for the adapter on the OSX side, and then map the resulting serial device to a COM port via configuration in VMWare, but I'd recommend doing what I did (last time I messed with a Keyspan adapter in OSX the drivers were pretty outdated and therefore difficult to deal with).

If anyone else is using VirtualBox, you might find you need to add the USB device to the guest multiple times -- for some reason it disappeared on me a few times before it stuck. Again, I doubt VMWare would have that particular issue.

Hope it's helpful!