We presently have four active or semi-active Dell Optiplex 760 computers in the house running Windows 7 Pro 32 bit at the moment. (Plus a Dell Optiplex 625 that was Win 7 Home, now on Win X;Little Miss Field Day's new Win X laptop; her deceased Win 8 laptop; and a handful of laptops that are too old to upgrade -- two Win XP, one W2K. Those are future Linux candidates, but I digress)
So I bit the bullet last night, and scheduled the shack computer for the Win X update. Kinda running out of time, since, officially, the 'free' update to Win X from Win 7/8 ends on the 29th.
I was a little concerned, since the shack computer has some old routines I wrote, years ago, to manage my log and my QSL cards. How old? It was written in ... wait for it ... dBase IV 1.1. For DOS. OK, so I'm a procrastinator. In any event, they don't run on Visual dBase 5.7 or anything newer. The core programming is OK, it's just that the screen windows are using the old, now obsolete, @ say/get nomenclature, and I never got around to rewriting them as proper, ah, Windows windows.
To say nothing of the fact that dBase IV 1.1 for DOS is a 16 bit app. And I know from work that 16 bit apps don't run under Windows 8.1 -- 64 bit, though.
But, I figured, time to bite the bullet. I'd worry about rewriting the routines later, after all, I can still access the database tables through dBase 5.7 or 8.
So I set the upgrade to process at 1 AM. Checked the machine when I got up this morning, and outside of some very minor issues (NIC wasn't responding, but a reboot fixed that -- router issue, not a PC issue), everything else worked. I do have to do some tweaking to VE7CC's cluster app to get it to start automatically on boot again, but that's, again, a minor thing. Oh, and the M$ free games are gone, which I expected, but I already have the ZIP file to restore them all, so that's no big deal. I do have to check N1MM+, but either it will work, or I upload a new copy. No sweat either way.
Just for the heck of it, I tried to open dBase IV. Much to my shock and amazement... it opened! Win X did have to upload an NTVM (or was it NTVDM?) driver first, but it opened! No muss, no fuss. And yes, my little routines still work, too! [ I still have to rewrite them into the newer code, but now I can continue to procrastinate ]
Well, what do you know? Micro$oft actually did something right for a change? Who Gnu? (He'll let you know when he gets off First)
Shack machine will be finished tonight. The Boss's is next, that should be easy. Then either my "work/main" machine, or LMFD's old desktop (which is going to end up in the shack anyway). Should have it all done by the weekend.
M$ did something right. I'm not sure I can handle this.
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