VISTA

If you have to buy a machine with Vista make sure you get a business version so that you can *legally* downgrade it to XP without having to buy another license.

Google for vista downgrade rights and the first two hits should be MS documents telling you what you can do.

Stephen Pelc meinte:

I use two of them with my Thinkpad, running Vista Ultimate. I flash with that a AT91RM9200 with Linux Kernel and rootfs. No problems.

I am not affiliated with Microsoft in any way, however I consider their products to be good, especially by the price/performance parameter. The MS stuff simply works, requiring the minimum interference from my side. BTW, the C/C++ compilers from MS are the least buggy compilers I've encountered.

Linuxopathia is mental disorder with the following typical symptom: a person can't help cursing MS and preaching Linux whenever he heard the word "Windows". The linuxopathic patients think that they possess a sacred knowledge which makes them different and superior to anyone else.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant

The problem MC is that fact that engineering tools are typically written by engineers, not software developers. I remember when I was doing hardware, my experience with software was assembler, c and VB and that was it. I could not program real applications for windows. I then started developing c++ app's for windows and learned a whole new way to write software. No more did I write software that talked directly to hardware, I used the windows API. Now I specialize in win32 api. As an engineer there is no real requirement to do this, so most app's tend to be poorly written for windows. Despite what most people think writing windows app's is a specialized field, and if you don't understand what you are doing its easy to destabilize the OS, as is with any other type of software. Its getting better with MS, but as they improve stability by removing access to certain areas of the OS they also break backward compatibility. There will be even less backward compatibility with newer versions of windows.

I was talking about using the XP drivers under Vista. With proper Vista drivers, they seem to be ok. But Prolific don't release generic Vista drivers and I was using el-cheapo generic units.

Stephen

Linux is our only hope to escape the evil.

I am running Vista Ultimate64 bit, the one that is REALLY suppose to be a compatibility nightmare and the ONLY app that I couldn't get running was a 16 bit install of WinCUPL that I use to support some older hardware. The only 32 bit app that I had ANY problems with was cured by setting the compatibility tab to WinXP SP2 and granting it administrator rights.

I run the WinCUPL in a VMware install of XP.

I will say that I did buy a new copy of my antivirus software just because of its' Vista64 support and I bought new DVD burner software so I could take advantage of my dual Blu-Ray drives.

Just for grins I have copies of Win3.11, Win95, Win98, Win98SE, and Ubuntu Linux available to run under VMWare, but I rarely power up any other than the WinXP virtual box.

I like WinXP and still have several boxes with it on them, but having

I'll probably gag on this but... I like Vista better than Linux. No use for linux at all.

My wife's Dell notebook came with Vista. I'm very glad I don't have to do development with it. Every time she asks for some help Vista gets in the way.

Certainly part of that is I don't use Vista on a regular basis, but I really don't like many of its features.

We use XP for all of our development machines. Even so, most are set for Classic Start Menu and Classic Control Panel. Vista and even XP seem aimed at the home user and the office wonk. Linux strikes me as a throw back that is too far back.

Maybe to be fair I should put up a machine with a current Linux distribution, but so far I don't see the point.

I have never had a problem with Vista and a USB device. In fact I have had LESS problems that I did with Win98SE and XP Pro. I use a pretty good mix of devices too. Thumb drives, portable disk drives, external DVD drives, serial adapters, cameras, even a USB floppy. Maybe I'm just the lucky one.

That may be true, and IIRC some stuff was written in VB6. But the fact of the matter is that some of it would not work under Vista. At least that's what I was told on the phone (they had tried). That might be different a few Vista service packs later but why take a chance when everything runs just fine under XP? All it would take to put a serious crimp into my working environment is one lone app that would refuse to run. For us self-employed folks the time lost due to that would be zero-income time, not good.

Well, try to tell that to the "Brother Control Center" software that runs the network multi-function here ...

Or take CAD: The majority of CAD programs keeps the library files with the program files. If they wouldn't the SW would be less portable for trips. And what's the problem with it anyhow? A good engineer knows this and backs up accordingly. I have had four HD failures of the "Screech ... clatter ... ka-crunch" type over the last 20-some year. Meaning almost instant self-destruction. I have not lost a single library part. Or anything else for that matter except for very few emails (and my server allows secondary retrieval so I had them back after returning home). But, Linux does not give me that freedom or at least makes it cumbersome. So it's not for me.

Whereverunto you dream of escape, evil is already there.

Op Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:20:43 +0100 schreef MC :

This concept isn't new, try deleting someone else's "My Documents" folder on NTFS under XP. Depending on their settings, this might or might not work. File permissions in NTFS become especially painful when trying to use an external harddisk between multiple Windows machines. Luckily Cygwin lets you set all files' permissions to rwxrwxrwx, but when copying (in Explorer), the destination permission is always(?) set to rwXr-Xr-X.

In that case we are doomed.

I will not fork over a Gates-tax of $100 just for the right to dump the "upgraded" OS in order to downgrade. Which is pretty much tantamount to burning a $100 bill. In December I simply moved on, found a PC that came with an XP license, and bought that one.

Or buy a PC sans OS, apply the savings towards the OS you really want and get something like this:

Apart from wasting time and backup media space needlessly copying stuff that could be reinstalled if necessary ... not a thing.

George

Vista and 7 both have .NET built in and are compiling parts of the OS for the global cache during the install (mainly services). If you have a lower end machine it can take forever.

George

Well, of course I only backup libraries and custom scripts. Maybe a megabyte, if that. This also includes libraries delivered with the program because I found that they were sometimes changed with new releases and if you are on an auto-install scheme you could lose some models.

Its well possible that applications written in VB6 will not work under vista. One of the biggest problems with vista is that they have really tightened up the security on it, so if a VB6 app attempts to write to a location on the HDD that requires elevated permissions then it wont work. ITs not just VB that suffers from this. I am no longer doing hardware, but I still use protel 99se to look at some old files, and protel99 will not load up libraries under vista.

I too am self employed, so I can understand why you dont like to waste time. However sometimes you have to take the effort to get stuff to work, or eventually you will end up so far behind that you cant catch up. I have seen this a lot in engineering circles. This is how I make my money now. I bring your old software up to date to run on vista and server 2008.

In saying this however, if you are currently running XP, and it works for you then there is not much point upgrading. However, just remember that XP will have an end date one dayl. And for those that might think that this is a MS only problem you are wrong, linux also suffers from this problem.