[Coco] OT: Upgrade to WIndows 10?

[Mark McDougall]

On 24/11/2015 6:00 PM, Richard E. Crislip wrote:

> I did and am not sorry for it, but YMMV.

The issue I have, as a developer and provider of solutions, is that my 
customers are using a range of OS'es and in order to ship a fully tested 
system, I often need to install different versions of Windows.

We switched to Windows 7 (64-bit) in the office some years ago when it 
became necessary to install more than 3GB of memory to run some of our 
development apps. I'm loathe to upgrade again now because of the vast 
back-catalog of development tools - some no longer in development or 
supported - that I need to run. As it stands, there's one compiler that 
needs a 'hack' just to be able to build on Win7.

We recently had a client whose corporate IT dept mandated that everyone 
upgrade from XP to Win7; and our software broke. It's custom 
device-level disk software written to strict specifications and it turns 
out, after much research, that Win7 does not allow the type of disk 
access that is required to provide this solution. The client had no 
choice but to downgrade to XP on these machines, which they shouldn't 
have touched in the first place since they were single-purpose machines 
designed to run one specific, and quite important, turn-key application. 
A classic case of corporate IT wanting control over everything without 
any consideration for the consequences.

Right now I have one client running XPe, for which we've written device 
drivers. It was sufficient to develop under Win 7 and thankfully there 
were no major issues when cross-compiling for XP(e).

I also have another client using both XP and Win 8.1 (bleh!). An issue 
arose just yesterday with 8.1 and now I'm faced with installing that on 
a machine and coming to grips with it (never having used it). To say I'm 
not looking forward to the experience is an understatement.

No doubt it's only a matter of time before a client mandates use of 
Windows 10. I guess I'll be faced with a decision on whether to upgrade 
my development machine at that point. Until then, this old dog is not 
interested in learning any new tricks.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"