If I’m asking this question in the wrong forum area (or on the wrong messageboard), please jump in and let me know where I should ask it.
Until two weeks ago, I was happily running Windows XP on my six-year-old PC. Then its hard disk died. I was eventually able to get the old PC back up and running after a system restore, but I figured that my old PC was telling me that it was time to be replaced, so I did so.
My new PC is a Windows 7 machine (home premium edition) that I purchased at my local computer store. It’s really neat and I have been able to install most of my old programs on it. Most. The three notable exceptions (all legal software) are my old Palm Pilot software, my old copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 6.x, and an ancient FORTRAN compiler (Compaq Visual FORTRAN 6.6, no longer sold nor supported by Compaq).
Only the FORTRAN compiler is a serious issue, but a serious issue it is - I support a number of older FORTRAN programs that were written long ago using that compiler for a small company that isn’t interested in upgrading its programs either to a new compiler or a new language. Until I resolve this issue one way or another I can’t retire my old PC.
I’ve heard that apparently I can easily upgrade my copy of Windows 7 Home Premium to something called Windows 7 Home Professional, and that with Windows 7 Home Professional I will be able to download (at no cost) and run something called Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP mode that will supposedly let me install programs that normally run under XP but not under Windows 7.
Does anyone here have any experience with either 1) upgrading a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional, 2) using Windows Virtual PC and/or Windows XP mode under Windows 7, and especially 3) installing and running balky XP programs using those options?
Please, don’t generate responses telling me that I shouldn’t be using this old FORTRAN compiler. That’s not my decision to make.
I upgraded Vista to Windows 7 Professional (I don’t think ‘Home Professional’ is the right name) and I installed for free the XP emulator. It worked OK for the one critical program I had that wouldn’t run under Vista.
First off, have you tried running the applications installer in compatibility mode?
>upgrading a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional,
There really is no upgrade. You’ll have to delete the partition is start fresh.
>using Windows Virtual PC and/or Windows XP mode under Windows 7, and especially
XP mode has very specific hardware requires. It must run on a CPU with built in virtualization support. MS has a tool to check this. You may need to enable support via the BIOS.
If you cannot run XP mode you can still run VirtualPC, which has much more forgiving requirements. Its a free download so you can run this without upgrading your machine. Of course you will need a valid XP license to run as a virtual machine.
Btw, your software seems to run on wine under Linux. Heck you may be able to compile wine under cygwin and run it.
My bad. Microsoft refers to it as “Windows 7 Professional”.
Hadn’t even thought of that. I’ll give it a try.
Actually, Microsoft claims that an upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional involves only paying them about $80 to get a software key and applying that key to your copy of W7HP. It’s called their Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade feature. (A cynic would claim that you’ve already purchased a copy of W7P when you bought your copy of W7HP - you’re just not allowed to use it until you give Microsoft more money. But I’m not a cynic.)
Thanks - I just downloaded and ran that tool and it claims that my hardware has that feature, but that it is currently disabled and must be enabled in the BIOS. Its “user manual” even told me how to do that for HP computers. Cool Beans.
The “Anytime Update” version upgrade does not require a reformat, it just turns on some features that were previously turned off (and downloads updates and some new software). Vista had a similar feature. There are some limitations: the main one is that you can’t switch from 32 to 64-bit without a reformat.
*"No disks, no delays. And no leaving the house: With Windows Anytime Upgrade, you can upgrade to a more advanced edition of Windows 7—say from Home Premium to Ultimate—in as little as 10 minutes. That way, you get to take advantage of extra features while keeping your current programs, files, and settings intact.
In the past, upgrading Windows could be a bit of a hassle. In Windows 7, the software you need comes preinstalled. All you have to do is purchase an upgrade key from Microsoft or another authorized retailer to unlock those shiny new features."*
I can assure you that the only difference between the various Windows 7 install discs (within a given architecture, like x86) is one small text file (ei.cfg) that determines which edition to install. Of course, you need the product key that matches your particular edition.
Is the XP licence on your old hardware a standard one, or did it come bundled with the machine? - if the former (and possibly the latter, depending on the vendor), it may be possible to set up your current PC for multiple booting with XP and Windows 7 as choices at startup.
It was bundled with the old PC, and my intention (actually my need, given the next paragraph) is to keep that old PC at least technically alive until I know that all potential software problems have been resolved, so I don’t think that reusing that old license with my new PC would be realistic. Thanks for bringing that possibility up, though.
The good news is that I’ve been talking with the folks that I work for, and given that I’m the first internal user to be running a PC under Windows 7 they’re both going to cover my costs and time of upgrading to Windows 7 Professional, installing those XP mode and Virtual PC options, attempting to run those problem installs using one or more those options, rebuilding all of the apps I support using the results of those installs, and ensuring that the resulting applications run under (and get the same results under) both XP and Windows 7 machines.
Oh, yes, and before I do all that they want me to run a number of their internal applications that they provide to clients on my Windows 7 PC to ensure that these apps work under Windows 7. After all, if one of those apps turns a Windows 7 machine into a heap of burning rubble they’d rather find that out on my PC than a client’s.
If you never hear from me again you’ll know there were issues.
A minor update. I’ve enabled Virtualization mode in my BIOS, upgraded to Windows 7 Professional ($89.95 plus tax, did it online, took about ten mimutes), and downloaded and installed the free Virtual PC and XP mode features. The whole process took about an hour. Basically I can fire up a virtual XP machine inside my running Windows 7 machine anytime I want to. Piece of cake so far.
I’m going to attempt the hard part - installing and running my old compilers under XP mode - later on today. First I’m going to the gym to work out my tension in advance
The good news (for me) is that I didn’t run into any problems at all.
I successfully installed both Visual Studio 6.x and Compaq Visual FORTRAN 6.x from their installation CDs inside the Virtual XP machine (the CDs’ AUTORUN features didn’t work inside the virtual machine, but I was able to wander through the “My Computer” menus to get to the CDs and their installation Setup.exe files manually).
Running the various compilers has to be done inside the XP VM, but the apps they generated ran both inside the XP VM and on the Windows 7 side. And (so far, anyway) running those apps have yielded exactly the same results in all cases as their old XP-machine-generated equivalents did.
Sevenwood, are you running the 32 bit or the 64 bit version of Windows 7, I’m asking because of what Drachillix said above concerning the 64 bit, I also want to move my Vista machine to Win 7 and I’m considering going with the 64 bit version but I’m also using Visual Studio. Thanks for any info.
I can’t speak for Sevenwood, but I’m running Win 7 64 bit with the virtual XP machine, and my old 32 bit apps run fine. I have Visual Studio but haven’t loaded it yet, but my other main programming app, Clarion 6, which wouldn’t run at all in Win 7 64 bit, runs just fine. I think Visual Studio should work as well.
As near as I can tell, the VM is Windows XP Pro 32 bit, pretty much exactly as if it were running on its own box. It is pretty slick.
The only problem I have is that accessing folders on the host drive from within the VM is godawful slow compared to accessing folders in the VM “drive”. So I do all my program generation within folders in the VM, and then copy the generated exe files out to the host drive for use or distribution to customers.
I’m running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Premium (which before the Windows Anytime upgrade was the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium). The problem with my copy of Visual Studio was apparently because it was the now-ancient Visual Studio version 6.x. From my perusal of Microsoft’s web site, apparently later versions of Visual Studio can install under Windows 7 directly.
What, you expected a FORTRAN programmer to have up-to-date programs on his computer?
I appreciate any and all suggested options, but I very much doubt that this one is compatible with our current Compaq Visual FORTRAN 6.x source code. Quoting from the link you provided:
“Because some older Fortran features (such as COMMON and EQUIVALENCE) can violate the CLRs rules for type safety and interfaces, certain restrictions had to be placed on .NET applications that do not allow 100% compatibility with Fortran standards”
So we’ve got here a FORTRAN compiler that doesn’t comply with FORTRAN standards. Oh, yeah, that’s going to work with our kazillion-line forty-year-old FORTRAN programs that are just loaded with those statements.
Seriously, the option we were ready for as a last resort was Intel’s Visual FORTRAN compiler version 11.x for Windows, which is supposedly source-code compatible with Compaq Visual FORTRAN 6.x (after Compaq gave up on it and sold it to HP, and then HP gave up on it and sold it to Intel). But fortunately that no longer appears to be necessary.
Dear…
I have the same problem with CVFortran 6.6 in windows 7. I am using premium edition of windows 7, but the problem exists again. I need help because my all projects are in CVF and with Array Visualizer.
