I'd been holding off on the Windows 10 upgrade due to inertia, but when my 7-year-old Win7 machine started exhibiting some recalcitrant bootup behavior, I decided to replace it and do the Win10 thing at the same time. I bought another Dell workstation, this time a 7810. It came with Win7 Pro installed, so I did the Win10 upgrade, then repartitioned and reformatted the drive and did a clean install of Win10 to get rid of all the Dell bloatware.
As to the OS itself, I'm finding Win10 mostly fine. One annoying problem I've noticed is that file timestamps shown in Explorer don't refresh automatically, which is a pain if you're trying to verify whether or not the file you just saved went to the desired location.
Software I rely on that seems to be working fine: TBC (I think I'm on v3.61), Star*Net v6, Thunderbird, Firefox, Acrobat Pro v9, Notepad++, Xnview, Trimble Data Transfer, Google Earth Pro, BricsCAD v16. (This is the first time since 1993 that I haven't had any Autodesk products installed on my computer. Sayonara, Autodesk!)
Software I (used to) rely on that isn't working:
1. Peachtree Complete Accounting 2010. It installed fine, but my registration code isn't recognized. This application is no longer supported by the publisher (Sage), and Sage no longer provides a product suitable for a business the size of mine at a reasonable cost, so I'm going to have to find another solution. This is pretty much a major bummer, as I've used Peachtree since 1993. I looked at Quickbooks, but found the pricing unappealing. Since most of my business records are in an Access database, I only need something to keep track of general ledger stuff, with a very minor need for payroll. I'm mostly solo these days, and only write a couple of payroll checks per year. I'm going to look into some of the web-based applications, which seem to have some no or low-cost options.
2. Microsoft Office 2010. Similar to Peachtree, it installed fine but won't recognize the registration code. I went looking for a newer version and discovered that Access is no longer bundled with Office unless you get one of the E3 (enterprise) version of Office 365. At $20 a month, that seemed a little steep to me. I tried Libre Base, and while it loaded by business database, it was way too slow to be effective, so I bought a standalone version of Access 2016 for $110, and it's working fine.
3. I'm still experimenting with Libre Calc (Exel replacement) and Libre Writer (Word replacement). I think I can probably make those work, and say goodbye to the rest of MS Office.
If I run into anything further that might be interesting, I'll post an update.
I ended up moving to 10 from 7 because of an issue with TBC (Windows' not Trimble's fault) and have been running it for about six months now. Overall, I like it better than anything Microsoft has done since Windows 95. My work machine is a Macbook Pro running bootcamp and it is by far the smoothest that type setup has ever run.
Win10
eviscerated the touchsmart capabilities on my HP. But it wiped it out. I wonder where all that info went. I seldom used it.
Also by using the quick start in Win 10 it messed with some keyboard and other settings so I disabled that.
Also after upgrades it screws with some stuff too. Trying to force edge and photo crapola.
Jim Frame, post: 370703, member: 10 wrote: I'd been holding off on the Windows 10 upgrade due to inertia, but when my 7-year-old Win7 machine started exhibiting some recalcitrant bootup behavior, I decided to replace it and do the Win10 thing at the same time. I bought another Dell workstation, this time a 7810. It came with Win7 Pro installed, so I did the Win10 upgrade, then repartitioned and reformatted the drive and did a clean install of Win10 to get rid of all the Dell bloatware.
As to the OS itself, I'm finding Win10 mostly fine. One annoying problem I've noticed is that file timestamps shown in Explorer don't refresh automatically, which is a pain if you're trying to verify whether or not the file you just saved went to the desired location.
Software I rely on that seems to be working fine: TBC (I think I'm on v3.61), Star*Net v6, Thunderbird, Firefox, Acrobat Pro v9, Notepad++, Xnview, Trimble Data Transfer, Google Earth Pro, BricsCAD v16. (This is the first time since 1993 that I haven't had any Autodesk products installed on my computer. Sayonara, Autodesk!)
Software I (used to) rely on that isn't working:
1. Peachtree Complete Accounting 2010. It installed fine, but my registration code isn't recognized. This application is no longer supported by the publisher (Sage), and Sage no longer provides a product suitable for a business the size of mine at a reasonable cost, so I'm going to have to find another solution. This is pretty much a major bummer, as I've used Peachtree since 1993. I looked at Quickbooks, but found the pricing unappealing. Since most of my business records are in an Access database, I only need something to keep track of general ledger stuff, with a very minor need for payroll. I'm mostly solo these days, and only write a couple of payroll checks per year. I'm going to look into some of the web-based applications, which seem to have some no or low-cost options.
2. Microsoft Office 2010. Similar to Peachtree, it installed fine but won't recognize the registration code. I went looking for a newer version and discovered that Access is no longer bundled with Office unless you get one of the E3 (enterprise) version of Office 365. At $20 a month, that seemed a little steep to me. I tried Libre Base, and while it loaded by business database, it was way too slow to be effective, so I bought a standalone version of Access 2016 for $110, and it's working fine.
3. I'm still experimenting with Libre Calc (Exel replacement) and Libre Writer (Word replacement). I think I can probably make those work, and say goodbye to the rest of MS Office.
If I run into anything further that might be interesting, I'll post an update.
I'm running MS Office 2010 on Win 10. MS Office 2010 came with my laptop and Win 7 then I did the upgrade to Win 10 and Office is still there and working fine.
John1Minor2, post: 370747, member: 404 wrote: I'm running MS Office 2010 on Win 10. MS Office 2010 came with my laptop and Win 7 then I did the upgrade to Win 10 and Office is still there and working fine.
Many programs will survive the upgrade to Win10, but if you ever have to reinstall you'll be unhappy. That's what happened with my Peachtree, it worked for months after the upgrade till I needed to reinstall then nothing would make it work again.
I found a torrent for the ISO... downloading it now. I will try a virgin install. I am not willing to take the risk of doing the "upgrade" ... too darn much trouble
In my original post I forgot to mention:
1. No driver for my DesignJet 450C, and the print server trick that worked with Win7 doesn't work with Win10. Since most of my deliverables are digital these days, I plan to keep the Win7 machine around just for plots as an interim solution.
2. No driver for my LaserJet 4. I know, it's 23 years old, but it still makes great prints! I was given an HP 4250 - which is slightly newer, being from 2003 or so - but I haven't tried that yet.
Hit HP's site and search for the universal designjet driver and also search for a universal driver for the printer language that your other printer uses (pcl6,5,4, etc). They've gone the universal driver route to support most of their legacy stuff on Win10.
Jim Frame, post: 370786, member: 10 wrote: In my original post I forgot to mention:
1. No driver for my DesignJet 450C, and the print server trick that worked with Win7 doesn't work with Win10. Since most of my deliverables are digital these days, I plan to keep the Win7 machine around just for plots as an interim solution.
2. No driver for my LaserJet 4. I know, it's 23 years old, but it still makes great prints! I was given an HP 4250 - which is slightly newer, being from 2003 or so - but I haven't tried that yet.
I have an HP DesignJet 500 working on with Windows 10.
HP does NOT have a Windows 10 driver, but I downloaded the Windows 8.1 driver and it loaded fine.
Stephen Ward, post: 370789, member: 1206 wrote: Hit HP's site and search for the universal designjet driver and also search for a universal driver for the printer language that your other printer uses (pcl6,5,4, etc).
No luck with the universal DesignJet driver. When I print the test page, all I get is a single line across the sheet. Trying to print a real document results in a page full of wide black bands. Did you get this to work with Win10 and a 450C?
I wasn't able to find a PCL5 driver for Win10, so I think I'm out of luck on the LaserJet 4. The LaserJet 4250 uses PCL6, which should work okay.
We upgraded a desktop to Win10. One of the dumbest things I have ever done. Microsoft kept bugging me and bugging me so I finally did it. It has had stupid problems like the start menu disappearing for no reason. I have a fix for that. Wife hasn't complained in a while so maybe Microsoft finally fixed it. When they start bugging me to upgrade to Win11, forget it man. Upgrade upgrade upgrade for months then when I do you deliver a buggy POS.
If I have a Win7 computer I would leave it alone. There is really no good reason to upgrade to 10.
I use Win10 on my new laptop but it came with it and there hasn't been any problems except early on it took me hours to figure out Kaspersky was conflicting with an Avast wifi thing in there which I didn't know was installed on the computer. Uninstalling the Avast thing solved the issue.
I still haven't tried the LJ4 -- it's still sitting inconveniently on the other side of my office -- but after upgrading my old Win7 workstation to Win10 with apparent success, I was still dismayed that I had to rely on it to run Peachtree. Even with the old machine sitting out of the way and accessing it via Remote Desktop Connection, it bothered me not to have a business-critical application running on my current desktop, so I decided to have another go at Peachtree. The original install on my new Win10 machine went okay, it was the activation code that wasn't working. I went back to my original record of serial number, activation code and customer ID, and this time when I entered them Peachtree accepted the credentials and appears to be running normally. Knocking on wood!
My laptop upgraded itself to Win10 one evening despite me saying "no" every time I started the damn thing.
Good thing I had an upgrade to Carlson '16 because '15 won't run on Win10.....
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Jim Frame, post: 374536, member: 10 wrote: this time when I entered them Peachtree accepted the credentials and appears to be running normally.
I spoke too soon. Peachtree is back to asking for a registration number, saying I have only 1 unregistered use left. Rats!
The only aggravation I've seen is that Windows 10 has a penchant for replacing drivers (like USB to serial drivers to run a total station), with their own "up to date", and "signed" versions, regardless of your intention to do so or not. It seems to do this every time it takes a significant security update. Haven't found a way around it other than to park copies of the drivers somewhere safe, then re-install after every update.
Other than that, what can you say? Windows will always be Windows.:-(
I decided to try mucking around under the hood to see if I could salvage my Peachtree install, as I figured I didn't have much to lose. I inspected a bunch of Peachtree system files with a hex editor, but didn't really think that they'd put the registration info there. However, I did find a reference to a Windows registry entry that looked interesting: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPeachtreePeachtree Complete Accounting17. I launched RegEdit, but my registry doesn't have that key. However, I remembered a reference to a similar entry that I saw during one of my many web searches on the subject, so I looked there and found HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWOW6432NodePeachtreePeachtree Complete Accounting17. One of the subkeys is Licenses, and it contains 4 subkeys: (Default), CustomerID0, RegistrationNum0 and SerialNum0. The only one with a value was SerialNum0, which had my S/N. So I loaded my customer ID into CustomerID0 and my activation code (which I had saved from the initial activation in 2011) into RegistrationNum0. I then launched Peachtree, and it came up without asking for an activation code. I'll have to see if it still works after I reboot, but I'm encouraged.
Cold boot this morning, launched Peachtree without incident. I'm marking this a success!
Good going Jim. You impress me quite often with your tenacity.
Licensed Land Surveyor
Finger Lakes Region, Upstate New York
