Hi

I don't know how much help this is going to be but I have had the same 
problems as you. But my machine is a home built one. Other than that 
pretty much the same setup.

I too had some problems getting my Brother to work in Win 7. Mine is a 
HL-5140, I did find drivers on Brother's website but they are NOT 
supported and Brother's TS said they won't work in 64 bit Win 7. But In 
my case they do. I had to extract the files manually and NOT use the 
setup. Went through Device Manager to install. I also had problems 
because the printers are on a network and are not local to me. So that 
caused a small problem but worked that out under the security tab.

As you are considering dual booting, it is a very good option. I do dual 
boot, XP Ubuntu 11, Win 7. The only problem I had was XP wouldn't 
recognize all my memory (8gig).
It does recognize only 2 of the 8. But that was expected. Also If you 
install XP 32 bit then your hardware will only run in 32 bit since the 
OS is the key factor not the hardware. I have been dual booting for 
about a year now and have not had a problem yet running my Brother under 
XP or Ubuntu for that matter, and actually the printers run better under 
XP than Win7. So I would suggest if you have exhausted all the 
possibilities under WIN 7 than I would go the dual boot route.

One more suggestion if you decide to go the dual boot way, if you have a 
spare drive in the box use it for the OS. Dual booting goes smoother if 
run on separate drives rather then the same drive partitioned out. The 
later will of course work but I find less problems with separate drives. 
I Dual boot each OS using a drive for each OS. Some may say overkill but 
I have found a lot less hassles to deal with.

Anyway Good luck!!

Brad

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