windows 7 compatibily mode

[zak]

a civil engineering graduate wants to install the old Autocad 2006 on windows 7, it is installed, but he can't run it, it display an error. i have googled and it turns that windows 7 have an xp mode. so in the autocad 2006 folder i right click on acad.exe and from the menu click on:
Troubleshoot compatibily
click trouble shoot program
choose the program worked in earlier versions of windows
choose windows xp sp2
click start the program
and after the program starts successfully, return to the previous form and click Yes save these settings for this program

i hope windows 8 will circumvent these difficulties , to run xp, 98, 95, Dos old programs. i forgot windows 3.1

[John Spikowski]

i hope windows 8 will circumvent these difficulties , to run xp, 98, 95, Dos old programs. i forgot windows 3.1

There is no money in offering backwards compatibility with Windows. The idea is to get you committed to a proprietary OS, give you enough time to learn and and write your code and just when you see as potential for a ROI, MS pulls the rug and you have to start the process over again with the latest offering.

Under Linux, I run Windows (Wine) and DOS in virtual 8086 mode of the processor for a hardward VM with DOSEMU. (DOOM2 is awesome under DOSEMU)

Why wait for another broken promise of interoperability? If your not already getting up to speed with Linux, you should be.

[zak]

sure i will try linux with wine in a few months, before a year i have installed linuxmint-9 which is a flavour of ubuntu from inside windows 7, but somehow it is corrupted. so i am waiting to buy a bigger hard disk , so i am planning to partition the disk to 3 primary partitions and one logical. in the 3 primary partitons i will install windows xp, windows 7, and either ubunto or linuxmint, in linux mint it is easy to install software from their site directly http://community.linuxmint.com/software/browse just by clicking a button install from the specific soft page:

http://i55.tinypic.com/2yoprow.jpg

usually i switch between different partitions using an os selector, in my case i use vcom system commander (discontinued now), and the primary partitons preferably must be hidden from each other to prevent corruption
i will install linux independently to prevent corruption.
but to be honest i feel that microsoft windows will stay ahead of the other OS's unless specialy Linux different versions united in one major version (and this is the mission impossible), and even ubunto make its usage much more usable, but still using linux from a normal user are harder than windows. when i have linux mint installed i have tried to install the opengl driver for my geforce 7300 GT and after a very long reading and searching it is installed, but the quality of opengl colors as tried with perl opengl examples are not as good as in windows. so the companies who made the drivers for their software must make a better drivers and this is only possible when there is a ONE Linux ( and this is impossible).
any way i can see that most scientists are using linux , but the normal users like me are using windows.
i asked once a secretary who works for years in a company what is the OS she use for her computer, she don't know, she is just find the pc running and she use its ms word for typing.
the point is that the OS's must be transparent from the normal user, and when he looks from a windows he will see the outside scene and not the window glass. the way linuxmint site install software is the right way, but still more steps needed.