Windows 7 32 or 64 bit ?

[charles]

may not, being the operative phrase. I am still using my nearly 10 year old scanner (Epson 1660) although when I first went to W7 two years ago the driver hadn't yet appeared.

[george [dicegeorge]]

Microsoft support expirys: xp 8april2014 win7 home 13 april 2015 win7pro 14 april 2020

so get win professional (if i've researched it right)

[g]

[Adrian C]

However much before then, Apple will have expanded, bought Microsoft, and all update support for Windows products will suddenly be ditched?

[Tim Streater]

That's certainly the preferred scenario.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Nah. both will have evaporated by then. As will te desktop home PC.

Workstations - things with big monitors and proper keyboards will run linux and noddy users will have some sort of linux based fondleslab and all the apps will be on cloud 9.

Which they will avidly download on the three days a month the sun is shining or the wind blowing hard enough for the internet to work.

in between hunting and eating the harry's of the world who have got them into this mess in the first place.

[Richard Russell]

Oh, please! The WoW64 emulation is near perfect, whereas Wine is awful by comparison. BBC BASIC for Windows runs correctly on all versions of Windows from 95 onwards, but it doesn't run under Wine, primarily because of this longstanding bug:

cannot be taken seriously when it doesn't bother to implement a documented and useful API function that's been present since Windows 3.11.

Richard.

[Steve Firth]

Who gives a f*ck? Only tossers emote about BBC Basic, it's dead, Dave.

[hugh]

Anything which relies on 32 bit windows explorer will not run on 64 bit W7. Unfortunately that includes my mail/usenet agent Turnpike which I am loath to give up.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , hugh writes

AIUI version 5 is OK if you can find a back copy.

Lots of discussion on the Demon newsgroups.

regards

[Clive Page]

Indeed. My experience is as follows.

My old laptop started having problems last year and I found that it was hard to avoid getting 64-bit Win7 on any reasonable replacement, so I gave in and did that. I found that the only *program* that didn't work was something called Turnpike (a very good reader for Usenet News). This used some features of 32-bit windows which weren't in the 64-bit version, and was also a "mature product" i.e. no longer being developed for new operating systems. All the possible work-arounds turned out to be dead ends. There is a Win XP mode in Windows 7 but it can't be used in Win7 Home Premium; you have to pay Microsoft an extortionate fee to upgrade it. Eventually I switched to using Thunderbird for news reading (it isn't as good, but I can live with it).

But printer drivers are also executable code, and I found that my new HP laptop would not work with my existing HP laser printer, because HP could not be bothered to create a 64-bit printer driver for it. It won't even drive it over the home network when the old printer is connected to the old Win XP computer which surprised me. Obviously HP are trying very hard to get me to buy a new printer. Again I eventually found a work-around, but it's clunky. As a result of my HP experience, when I do get another printer, it certainly won't be from Hewlett Packard.

So: if you use any programs which are no longer supported (in the sense of new versions still being developed), or device drivers for old devices, you might have problems. Other than that, everything is compatible.

By the way, the user interface for Windows 7 is substantially different, and in my view worse, but it's easy to find instructions on the web to get it all looking and behaving like Win XP. I see that Windows 8 has even done away with the "Start" button - so it's a good idea to get Win

7 before Microsoft messes things up even more.

[Mike Barnes]

hugh :

That's the one and only reason I've standardised on W7 32-bit. Fortunately 4 GB is plenty for my (not exactly modest) needs.

[charles]

HP have a "universal printer driver" which I am using, rather than one dedicted to a particular printer. It seems to have all the facilities that I need.

[John Rumm]

[snip]

A few have mentioned XP compatibility mode, so some comments are probably worthwhile.

Its true that you need Pro (or better) to use this out of the box.

However, XP mode is in reality a complete virtual machine running a real copy of WinXP. There is nothing to stop you using any other virtual PC hypervisor (including Microsoft's own Virtual PC) and installing your own real copy of XP on that.

However the confusion is added to, if you go to MS' web page for Virtual PC, where it will tell you you are not eligible to run XP mode on Win 7 Home for example. While this is true, its misleading, since its referring to the bundled XP mode, and not talking about installing Virtual PC and your own XP, which is kind of what you expect the web page about Virtual PC would be all about!

Running Virtual PC on Win 7 Home *is* a supported platform. However the difference is that with XP mode in Win 7 pro, it automatically includes the Win XP license required to run XP in this way. If you have the Home version (or Basic etc), you will need a separate fully licensed version of XP to install under Virtual PC to make it work.

[Mike Barnes]

That's all useful stuff, thanks.

I've no personal experience but I've heard of some difficulties with the apparently simple Virtual Machine approach. AIUI the virtual machine does not automatically get access to all the resources on the host PC. So you won't see your network drives, installed printers, etc, in the applications running in the VM. I'd hope that you can install them in the VM but even so it seems a bit of a faff.

[charles]

I was certainly able to access my scanner and printer when I had to use the virtual machine on first getting Win7. After a few months the right drivers were avavilable, so i don't use it any more.

[hugh]

In message , Tim Lamb writes

Yes, I'm plugged in to the Demon newsgroups. I may well go down the V5 route eventually. Of course our modus operandi is now geared to all the facilities of V6 and unlearning it might prove a bit tricky esp for SWMBO

[hugh]

In message , Mike Barnes writes

It's probably plenty for the vast majority of people, but the "more is better" brigade are running the show. I run XP on 2 gb and it's enough most of the time.

[charles]

It depends on what you are doing. I've got sound files well over 1GB in length. If I want to edit them it would be a much slower process with only

2GB memory

[John Rumm]

You need to chose which ones it gets by default when you configure it. Once running it can also see network shared resources just like any other PC. So in some cases you could for example give it access to a drive that the host machine has already shared, and to it, it looks like a native drive. Alternatively, it can share it itself (even when its the virtual machines host that is doing the sharing!)

So in short, its not trivial to configure, and if you can run software natively without needing to jump through these hoops, then usually so much the better. However if there is something that you really must run that can't hack the native environment, its an option.

[John Rumm]

Remember the OS base requirements are higher for Vista and Win7. So If you are just ok with 2 on XP, you will need more on later OSs.