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476
Living Room / Re: Win 7 XP mode
« on: March 08, 2011, 02:10 AM »
I don't think I expected quite this much help!  :D

Thanks, everyone!

The "need" is a BigFish game they already have a license for -- Luxor 2, I think -- and there's a long and mostly frustrated thread on the BigFish site that pretty much flattens any idea of getting it to work in Win7 native.

I don't want to flirt with anything illegal or risky -- the in-laws do NOT have any computer skills worthy of note and I've pretty much got their computer running without me having to go and interfere with it too often -- and I also don't want to do anything too obvious or needing of complicated stuff to make it happen.

The first go at this will therefore be borrowing their PC at the weekend while they're away and not needing it and setting up the MS solution, with a view to making the game run it seamlessly (which I gather is possible.)

If performance really sucks, I'll try one of the other virtualisation options -- I can always use the XP license from their old, dead PC.


477
I have posted a new beta in the release thread here:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1514

Lots of new stuff.

Brilliant! Thanks for all the work you've put into this. I'll give it a proper workout tomorrow!

-- bests, Tim


478
Living Room / Win 7 XP mode
« on: March 05, 2011, 11:20 AM »
Hi...

I have a problem.

My mother-in-law has a Win 7 64-bit desktop PC, that they bought when their XP box died.

My father-in-law's favourite computer game won't run on Win 7.

Microsoft's virtual XP/compatibility mode thing is a 500Mb download. It'll fix their problem.

They live in the middle of nowhere and their home broadband connection is Miserably Slow. It also suffers dropouts and general unreliability.

So... I want to download the relevant installation package for them. I have a nice quick broadband connection and a 500Mb download probably won't take much longer than the last time I downloaded a linux distro.

Thing is, if I try to download from Microsoft, it wants me to do a WGA thing. And I can't run the download on a machine that has an acceptable version of WIndows 7, as my netbook is Starter edition (dual-booting with Ubuntu!) and my desktop is Vista.

There must be a way to download it some way that doesn't require the download to happen on the machine it's to be installed on, but I can't find anything useful out. Anyone got any helpful suggestions? (I expect I've missed something obvious somewhere, but hey, I'm old and grumpy and entitled to make the occasional small mistake!)  ;)

479
Depending on your OS, maybe you had a Clipboard Chain Break?  Both ArsClip and CHS have ways of detecting that.  E.g., ArsClip Web Help:
Automatic clipboard chain break detection

Maybe, is as far as I'll go. In my experience, ArsClip reports breaks as well as attempting to deal with them when they occur -- and what was happening was that it was failing to work out where to paste clips, and telling me so.

I'm getting used to CHS's way of doing things, though, and Mouser's ideas about providing ordering facilities I think will bear useful fruit.

People want something that can knit, bake a good rice pudding and cycle up the curtains as well as put words on paper, it seems.

Souns like you're British  ;)  If you're old enough to remember Fidonet, the standing joke about Terminate was the forthcoming dishwasher interface...

I AM British. Don't hold it against me.

As far as Terminate's concerned, I remember it, I even used it, but I preferred Telix for comms. Fidonet -- well, I was 2:25/108 up until about 2003, when the computer it ran on suffered a fatal hard disk failure, resulting in the last known in-the-wild copy of DESQview breathing its last. (My BBS was called "Oblivion and You" and the "Oblivion" bit follows me around as it's generally the basis of my username on various fora around the place. Like here.  :)

(1989 might have been my first DTP package. That makes me feel suddenly very old.)

So you are old enough  :D  Remember GEM?  :)

That's what it ran under. I've got close a couple of times, but I've never actually had to use a Mac in anger, which was the only other option for DTP, back then. (I saw a Mac for the first time in about 1984. I called it an executive toy. For many years, I stood by that description!)

Welcome to the Moderately Honourable Brotherhood of Beta Testers, Suggestion Makers and Software Pesterers  :)

Thanks -- although I think it's worth concentrating on the "moderately" in its title.  :D

Humph.  Going too far off topic  :(  Apologies, mouser.

Agreed. Perhaps we should take our reminiscences somewhere more general?

--bests, Tim

480
Living Room / Re: Donation Coder Fever
« on: March 02, 2011, 07:09 AM »
Gizmo at TSA accidentally published an entry for tomorrow publicising this. See:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/during-march-new-free-utility-or-other-goodie-every-day.htm

  :D

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