On 04/15/2010 07:02 PM, Richard P. wrote: > A senior friend went out to a local electronics store and bought a new > Dell, 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium computer to replace his old XP > which has a failing hard drive. Unfortunately, the only program that > he has that will run on the new computer is his antivirus software and > AOL. Even his 6 month old HP digital camera's software won't run on > it. It will end up costing more to replace all the software than the > computer cost. >
I'm going to be honest, WinXP is really getting long in the tooth, and it's also only getting security upgrades i.e. Microsoft isn't going to upgrade it or release SP4 for it. Bluntly, you normally don't need propietary software to do things like download pictures from your camera. Win7 likely can deal with uploading or downloading pictures from most digital cameras just using Windows Explorer and a judicious choice of directories to download pictures to. Have your friend just plug in the camera and see if Win7 detects the camera. If that doesn't work, ask HP for Win7 software, incidentally if software runs on Vista, it normally works on Windows 7, and WinXP "drivers" can normally be pressed into service in Win7 too. I'm trying to suggest that Windows XP is a step backwards and one that like Windows 98 or WinME won't be viable in a few years. One problem for your friend most likely is that 64 bit software often isn't available for things like the six month old camera. That's the fault of the folks who sold the camera though. 64 bit Vista was out and having issues with all kinds of products, so there wasn't much excuse in not producing something that worked on a 64 bit OS. Finally I normally don't use Windows at all anymore, but I did play with Windows 7 in 32 bit mode. I even bought the 3 pack upgrade because it was obviously a big improvement over XP or Vista. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
