just made the nerd in me smile, simple things.

http://www.[censored]-windows.com/

you'll have to change to f_ _ king in the link

yer that link is not working mate!!

It's pants

What have they suddenly got against menu bars?

How can I put this? The capitals are intentional...

Dear Microsoft.

Once upon a time you had some clear, well-defined, and consistent user interface requirements. They were not to everyone's taste, but they worked on everything that followed the standard. Indeed, your guide to writing good user interfaces was excellent.

SO WHY THE FSCK ARE YOU MESSING AROUND WITH THE USER INTERFACE?

If it's not broken, there's no need to change it. Stop it at once.

Thank you.

Evolve or die?

There is a definitive amount of PC's to install your OS on, although this is increasing incrementally MS have to produce a new OS to keep there revenue stream active.

As much as I hate pointless release cycles for the sake of it (Autocad is by a country mile the biggest offender here) its a necessity for software company's to keep alive. Good software devs will give new original developments in there products. Others will rehash old ideas and force obsolescence.

Microsoft biggest downfall was XP, The best OS they have made, and ironicly the one that will cause them the most pain for future earnings. Its got its problems, security being one of them but for the most part, I have no real need to upgrade, just like I have no reason to move to the new Autocad 2011 or Revit 2011 or BA. Least MS haven't forced me to do it!

Yeah. I'm getting really really irritated now.

W7 (and I assume Vista) are incapable of running some older software. This is *inexcusable* - there is absolutely no reason why a system call should fail between versions, and it's inexcusable.

I now find myself in a position of hardware unreliability requireing this new laptop, which comes with W7 like it or not, which will not run software which is both essential to me and not directly replaceable. I am a seriously unhappy bunny.

Out of interest Neil, what apps are you having problems with?

I can see me needing to replace my laptop very very soon as I stupidly picked a Intel chip with out hardware visualization. I'm now in a situation where I have to dual boot xp32 bit instead of just loading a VM box

Can you not just load up a Sun VB box and just accept the annoyance? Or are you in the same boat as me?

The one that's giving me grief so far is Cuneiform OCR 6.0 - works fine on 2000 and XP and crashes without recovery from one of its dlls (themselves a bloody stupid idea which should have been strangled at birth).

Something of a pain since (a) it's a legal paid-for copy, (b) it can handle all the graphics formats I need, (c) it has a very useful batch mode that I need, (d) it has an excellent layout analysis, (e) it's lightning fast (sixty thousand words recognised a minute) and (f) my thesis is based on it... I'm currently evaluating Abbyy FineRead but that has a different set of issues.

Firing up a virtual machine presumably requires a legal winxp tp stick in it? Of course, the version of W7 that comes with every laptop doesn't include the XP-mode, even if the chips do (and why the hell an XP-mode should even be necessary I DO NOT KNOW!)

Oh, and while I'm at it - I tested the startrek console version in VC2008, works fine... left the computer for a few minutes and went into standby. Firing up again, the app still works, but it's lost contact with the USB port, and now it won't shut down. Even the task mangler can't close it, and doesn't even seem to notice the fact... if this is the best that a company supplying 80% of the market can do, I worry for the future of computing.

Yep. It does require an additional license of XP, or reuse an existing key from a PC thats been removed from live service. Hey, you could even pick up a copy of windows 2000 now for next to nothing. there esentualy the same core.
Windows tax rings true here but there is no point fighting it, I love most Linux distos but I have apps that need windows to run on

My last solution with my old laptop was a stable build of ubuntu with a install of windows 7 and windows XP running in sun VB. This was great allowing me to save states and have 0 day builds of windows with out the rubbish that seems to accumulate.

With my new laptop hardware visualization is off the table leaving me dual boot with my old XP license, a less than elegant solution

Hmmm. Got a clean 2k license not doing anything. Got a 4GB 2 processor laptop. Sun VB you say? On it...

Can such a virtual machine access external disc space, or must it be restricted to its own partition (or virtual partition)?

VB link

You can set up shared folders which act as a go between on the VM machine and real laptop HDD. Make sure once you have a install and windows booting that you install the additions that sun provide

Other than that, it worked fine with me, my network, files servers and all the apps I needed. It was actually quite quick as well. I think it was approaching 90% of the speed you could expect windows to be running on the same hardware

Thanks Sam.

Amazing. This is from a fresh download of firefox running under a virtual W2K. Colour me impressed.

Mind you, the world does look a bit funny in 16 colours and 800*600 resolution. I need to investigate that!

Have you installed the Sun VB additions in your W2k? Once you have you can drag the window corners to resize the W2k desktop. Neat.

Running in ubuntu with multiple desktop windows running and shortcut keys setup, It was a powerful setup. I could flip between windows XP and vista/7 in seconds, and return to native OS to run FF and email

As above, install the vb additions

Yep added the additions, linked a couple of directories as network drives, installed Cuneiform, sorted. Got the screen colours up, too.

Many thanks, Sam - I owe you a pint, next time...