I don't have any issues with speed going from my Vista laptop (or the Win 7 partition on the laptop) via VNC to my Win 7 desktop upstairs.
Of course, I turn off most of the Aero eye candy, as it does nothing except increase power usage and suck RAM. That could be part of your speed issue?
In my experience, Win7 will happily install most XP and Vista drivers. Win7 successfully installed, and all my peripherals worked on my old desktop, which was based on 6 year old MB, AMD 3200, and all the associated old hardware. With 1GB of RAM, no less.
I think its really going to be luck of the draw on your peripherals working in Win7. Best thing to do will be to Google your peripheral along with Win7. Chances are other people have the same peripheral as you do, and likely there will be a workaround.
I'm in the market for a new laptop computer. I need to have access to the same software and data files at two different locations, and have decided that a single laptop is preferable to maintaining two lots of hardware and trying to keep them in synch.
Much as I would like to get away from the clutches of Microsoft, I *need* Windows because I've got lots of software which won't run on anything else.
My current - rather elderly - laptop is running Win XP Home Sp3 and lots of essential applications - many of which came free with various PC magazines, and would cost a fortune to replace or upgrade - so my 'new' laptop needs to be able to run all of these. I've also got a number of USB devices - printers, scanners, MIDI interfaces, etc. - which need to work with the new laptop.
Most new laptops seem to come with Windows 7 - and I'm hearing comments suggesting that elderly software applications (e.g. Quicken 98, Design CAD
3000, etc.) which work perfectly well under XP may refuse to work under 7. Is this likely? Is there a solution? Would I also need new drivers for all my USB-based devices?Would I be any better off with Vista (which I've so far managed to avoid!) or would I face the same issues as with 7? [One or two half-way-decent-looking 'refurb' laptops are seemingly still available with Vista].
How easy is it to 'downgrade' a Vista or Win7 PC to XP - and would that solve my problems? [I have a valid XP-Home licence from a PC which I scrapped - and some original (may just be SP1) media - but not the latest version.]
Other Issues: How the heck do you backup and restore systems which no longer have floppy drives? In my current setup, I have Norton Ghost 2003 which needs to boot into DOS from a floppy - and can then clone a drive or partition to another internal or external (or network) drive. It doesn't provide the option of creating a bootable CD. Come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that it would recognise SATA disks! I get the impression that later versions of Ghost can backup the system disk while Windows is actually running. Is this correct? Also, they seem to come with a bootable 'recovery' CD from which to boot in order to restore a backup. Does this work ok? Is so, it looks like I'm going to have to invest in the latest version of Ghost!
Your comments - particularly regarding the best choice of OS for my particular circumstances - will be greatly appreciated.
It's possible, yes. Some might work under the compatibility options in Win 7. Some may just never work.
Depends. Some will just work under Win 7 (probably). Some might have new drivers available. Some won't. It's all a bit hit and miss.
No, no one is *ever* better off with Vista IMO.
Yes, but with less chance of being able to fix them. Win 7 is largely Vista but fixed. It's far from perfect but a whole lot better than Vista.
Getting harder and harder particuarly for laptops. We have plenty of laptops here that just won't run properly with XP as there are no drivers available for the hardware.
This isn't really my area, but running an image of your old XP machine under a virtual environment is a possible option if your new laptop is powerful enough. VMware (can't remember what the free version is) or the Sun^WOracle Virtualbox might be worth a look. You'd need something that offers the physical to virtual migration tools. Get a laptop with decent amount of RAM and if your existing machine isn't huge it might just work.
I have an XP, a Solaris and a Win 7 VM on my macbook and it works fine under VMware for what I need.
I'm writing this as a Solaris and MacOS user - but windows 7 is much better than Vista. As for XP on new hardware - it's getting harder and harder.
Darren
FWIW, I run Windows XP, Solaris, Ubuntu(*) and Plan9(+) under VirtualBox under Ubuntu.
(* Playing with new versions.) (+ Very slowly. But it runs.)
Macrium reflect? The free one does what I need it to do, and runs from a CD for recovery.
Most applications will run under the 32-bit version of Windows 7. Some older programs won't install under the 6-bit version. If you are going to have 4Gb or more of memory then the 64-bit version is definitely recommended. If you buy a machine with an OEM license you have to choose
32 or 64 bit at the time of purchase. Take a look at the Microsoft site to compare the different versions and licenses.That depends a lot on the devices. Common types of devices from major manufacturers will probably be OK. Obscure devices from obscure (and possibly long-gone) manufacturers may have problems. Those will be worse with the 64-bit version.
There is nothing that Vista gives you that isn't done as well or better by W7.
XP or W2K should install on modern hardware, but you may have trouble finding drivers for very new devices.
Thumb drive or possibly built-in memory-card slots. External USB hard-drives or DVD.
In my current setup, I have Norton Ghost 2003 which needs to boot
The machine is likely to come with a bootable recovery disk that will restore the disk to its ex-factory state. Personally I would get a humungous external disk-drive or two and back up an image to that, probably using Linux. I might even configure it with a minimal host OS and do all of my work on virtual machines that can be cloned at will.
If I was buying a new Windows machine today I would go for 64-bit Windows 7.
Generally agree with you Darren.
For compatibility, you might need to stick to the 32-bit version of W7.
Do remember that with W7 Pro you get a full copy of XP as a virtual machine in with W7 itself. (You might have to download it, but you are immediately licensed for that virtual copy of XP.) Make sure you have plenty of memory and processor power if you wish to use virtual machines.
Another option might be to leave your main computer (of whatever sort) at one location and use another to remotely access it - whether using LogMeIn, RDP, VNC or something else to do so. It could leave you free to get a lightweight (physically and in terms of performance) laptop to take with you. And no need to sync as everything is really on the main computer. WIth Wake-on-LAN facilities the remote machine doesn't even have to be running all the time. Might be totally useless to you, but a thought.
Indeed, if you have some things that won't run any other way, you could remote access your current computer.
I'm running XP in virtual box here.Native Debian.
If windos gets borked, revert to snapshot and as long as the DATA is on the main machine not inside windows, windows is up and freshly installed in 30 seconds!
I have just gone from XP SP3 on my old PC to Windows 7 64 bit on my new one. Only had problem was with Alk co-pilot 7 which apparently is not and will not be supported for Windows 7 64. I eventually googled enough to find a workaround via a registry hack. What I do find aggravating are the pop-up thumbnails from the taskbar. I haven't managed to find a way to turn them off but have now set the delay until they appear to 20000 (milli seconds). Also disabled one of the security options in IE (which I very rarely use) to save me having to override warnings every time I open digiguide from a link in the taskbar. One day I will find time to take a look at ubuntu but for the moment I find windows 7 stable and quite good. Just a battle to do things my way instead of how ms think everyone should do things. I have got an overclocked core 7 cpu and 6gb of ram which probably helps.
Personally, I run Linux as the host OS and Windows in a VM for when I absultely have to use it for something (extremely rarely in my case). I really wouldn't trust Windows as the host, in part due to poor design and in part simply due to it being the target of most security threats. Having it in a VM makes it very easy to back up the raw data and restore from a previous point if some nasty does get in.
I've used g4l (ghost for linux) before, booting from a CD, to do a raw backup of a Windows machine. Make sure that your target backup machine can handle the size of the file (I need to tweak my current Linux desktop as by default it won't create anything over 2GB in size) and that if you're using FTP to transfer the data, your target FTP server can cope with the size (some Windows flavours seem to quietly stop accepting data beyond 4GB)
cheers
Jules
Can you run USB-connected physical devices in a VM, or only software applications? I'm thinking of things like my Midiman Uno MIDI interface, for which there doesn't appear to be a W7 driver.
That would presumably require a fairly fast internet connection at both ends? At my main location, I have wired BB with a D/L speed of about 2Mbps (U/L much slower) and at the other location, I'm currently using '3' mobile internet, which struggles to get up to 500kbps (D/L) and 100kbps (U/L) - so I guess that remote access would be pretty dire!
You can in VirtualBox.
I spend a considerable proportion of my working life connected to various machines across the country. No control over the net connection at the far end. Varies from brilliant, through mostly fine, to a few which are not much fun. At a guess, the ones that are not good are on bottom end ADSL connections which are being used for many purposes other than my access to that location. Wish I had some real numbers to give you but we don't actually measure anything like traffic. Perhaps someone else could advise?
The best technologies minimise traffic by caching and all sorts of clever tricks. For me the best user experience is with RDP over a VPN. (I just don't like the effect of connecting and disconnecting VPN connections all day. But if it is all day to one location that is not much of an issue.) Main reason is that RDP will set itself to use the size of monitor you are connecting with (quite large in my case) whereas LogMeIn and VNC use the real monitor size - and some sites I connect to have postage stamps for monitors. But it is also quite fast and fluid.
I'd suggest you simply try it. For simplicity set up free LogMeIn on your computer and try to access it from somewhere else. (That will need a browser plugin on the computer you connect from. Works fine in IE and Firefox.)
Out of interest, what do you run Plan9 for?
Thanks J^n
Some of your applications are REALLY old. Quicken 98? Really, you should make upgrading to later versions a bit of a priority. [In my case, I upgraded from Quicken 98 to 2000 to 2003 to 2006 to 2010]. One problem is that you have waited SO long that you may not be able to move from 98 to 2010; you might have to try to find someone who actually has installation CDs of at least one or a few intermediate versions. Similarly with the other products.
I would recommend that you go with Windows 7 Professional, 32-bit. This will give you the most options and backwards compatibility. Most things will probably work, but it's absolutely the case that not everything will. The reason I suggested Professional instead of Home Premium is that with Professional, you have the option, at least, of using "XP Mode". I think that Win 7 is better than Vista in just about every way.
Also, be certain that the CPU in whatever laptop you are going to get supports "Intel Virtualization Technology". This is required for running "XP Mode", and is only supported by about half of current CPUs.
You can ALWAYS take a bootable floppy and make a bootable CD that will behave EXACTLY like the floppy (although, of course, you won't be able to write to it).
Roger Mills wrote:
In message , Barry Watzman writes
I've just been through this choice process with a friend.
Many business laptops come with Win7Pro with a separate XP Pro DVD to enable you to revert if necessary, and that's what I would definitely go for. Win7 Pro lets you make a Microsoft full backup, so it's easy to be sure you have a chance of reverting back to Win7 if you feel the need and you should have all the bits to do this with no hassle.
We looked at machines between about 450 and 1200 uk pounds, and eventually she chose one at the low end because she didn't seem to see much difference, and liked that keyboard. I suggested Win7, 64 for future proofing, but there seemed few of these.
I've run virtual machines, but I really think that on a laptop simplicity is all unless there is a real reason for multiple OS's.
At the moment she is still on 32-bit Win 7, having got most of her old programs to run. This included an old version of Quickbooks. She found the Win7 "import all your old stuff" application a nightmare. It took all night to do it and put the old software all over the place in her new machine. She is still sorting through it.
Have you tried it in virtual windows on ubuntu? Apps run almost seamlesly like that - the almost comes from the fact that ubuntu doesnt seem to create file associations in the win registry, but I've probably just not yet looked to see how to set it to do so.
most windows stuff runs on ubuntu now
ubuntu?
all built in with ubuntu - even windows 98 doesnt need usb driver installs if you install the nusb3.1 driver.
insert ubuntu cd, switch on, and just copy across whatever you want to. This will copy windows or your data to a thorough extent that windows itself won't. If win breaks, just copy the image back to the laptop.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but seriously all these concerns and many more are non-issues if you try Ubuntu. Linux has a poor usability reputation, but ubuntu is the distro that's really changed that. It costs nothing to try, and if for some reason you still want to get windows you can buy it if and when you find linux isnt what you want. The days of linux being only for geeks are history.
NT
Yes, Ghost 14
But why? My attitude is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"! Quicken 98 does everything I want - so why upgrade? [I did get a free millennium-proof upgrade for it - but it probably wasn't necessary because my wife is still using an even earlier version quite successfully!]
Useful advice - thanks!
Yes, I guessed that that must be possible. Would you care to elaborate as to how to go about it?
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.