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Suggestions Windows XP is Dead.
- Thread starter Attila Nagy
- Start date
Smoke_Jaguar
Man who touches printers inappropriately.
For the most part, totally true. Serial adapters are totally a thing, and you can get them for almost nothing. Software is where the pain can lie. Sometimes it can be worth rebuilding an XP machine if it means saving a few thousand bucks on a machine that is already on the short list for replacement.
Attila Nagy
New Member
Still don't get it. There is no need to have Windows XP, Ever.
I almost never disagree with you 2. HOWEVER I might confess that if I go over to the corner of the shop that
has 5/or 6 Roland engravers & metazas there is a 20 year old laptop running XP (if will blow the dust off it tomorrow)
if all someonecwants to do is run an ancient version of old Roland software or a rip WHY NOT?
It doesn’t need to see the internet. For all it knows bill clinton. Just got elected. ( or maybe George W)
I am not a complete Luddite, I can switch one wire and feed any of these machines from ASPIRE.
point is the older stuff still works
if I open my cabinet I have installation media for just about every thing going back to do’s 3.3 (disk images on those new writable cd drives)
has 5/or 6 Roland engravers & metazas there is a 20 year old laptop running XP (if will blow the dust off it tomorrow)
if all someonecwants to do is run an ancient version of old Roland software or a rip WHY NOT?
It doesn’t need to see the internet. For all it knows bill clinton. Just got elected. ( or maybe George W)
I am not a complete Luddite, I can switch one wire and feed any of these machines from ASPIRE.
point is the older stuff still works
if I open my cabinet I have installation media for just about every thing going back to do’s 3.3 (disk images on those new writable cd drives)
Attila Nagy
New Member
My problem is, People giving away perfectly good working machines, and buying cheap rubbish, just because they have been miss leaded. And I do not need more cutters or routers, 
Smoke_Jaguar
Man who touches printers inappropriately.
The Oce Arizona I have runs XP for the control system. No reliable way to go to a newer version. Always edge cases.
We had a large client who bought a biessemeyer cnc in 1994. it booted off 1.44 floppies, ran dos 3 in Italian. It took an auto cad (I don’t remember what version) file exported as .def)
I still keep in touch with tony the auto cad guy they hired ( he had just graduated from NJIT) 30 years later.
I still keep in touch with tony the auto cad guy they hired ( he had just graduated from NJIT) 30 years later.
Attila Nagy
New Member
You Should just say: "I do not know reliable way..." because someone does.
Smoke_Jaguar
Man who touches printers inappropriately.
When dealing with hardware that existed for basically one OS generation, drivers are going to be crazy specific. Already made an image of the drive on the Oce for backup sake and will probably convert it to a solid-state HDD for reliability sake. At best, an OS 'upgrade' might be shoe-horning Windows Vista on the thing at a huge hit to reliability (and one could argue that it would be a downgrade). Getting 64-bit drivers would basically be impossible, so would kneecap you on any current OS. Embedded systems be like that.
I am definitely going to scope out the system interface where it talks to the printer. The Scitex printers were fascinating, but the OS seemed to be somewhat custom.
If using an old vinyl cutter or something that just speaks HPGL over a serial connection, the operating system is almost a non-issue as long as you can generate the code and stream it to the port.
I am definitely going to scope out the system interface where it talks to the printer. The Scitex printers were fascinating, but the OS seemed to be somewhat custom.
If using an old vinyl cutter or something that just speaks HPGL over a serial connection, the operating system is almost a non-issue as long as you can generate the code and stream it to the port.
you can't always do that.
my oldest stratasys 3d printer uses something like an 80 gb pata drive.
i keep a spare or 2 on the shelf. they are getting harder to find.
I WOULD BE REALLY SURPRISED if you were able to get that old firmware to recognize an ssd with GPT partition
my suggestion would be, buy a handful of "rebuilt" of the largest size that machine recognizes.
BE SURE you have a disk image you can restore and have it function
you might well be able to find a way around the SSD thing, but, aren't you getter off saving your strength for the battles you HAVE TO fight?
Texas_Signmaker
Very Active Signmaker
Attila Nagy
New Member
What Version of Flexi is it?
Flexi7 can Run on Windows 7 32bit. Issues with Rip/Print on 64bit.
Flexi8 works with no issues on any Windows7 systems.
since. version10.5 can be used on Windows10 or 11 as well.
I run CASmate on Windows 10 32bit computers. Many of my Clients do not want to learn Flexi neither Enroute.
Texas_Signmaker
Very Active Signmaker
Flexi 8. Production manager won't run right
Smoke_Jaguar
Man who touches printers inappropriately.
Version locking is usually what locks people into an older OS. Lifetime licenses on production software is basically an endangered species these days as it is, and even then, you tend to not get newer versions as they come out with one. Not everyone wants to pay for perpetual subscriptions either, so sometimes you're put in the situation of having to run old software on an old platform to avoid paying for a software upgrade that will yield nothing except the ability to run on a newer OS as far as you're concerned.
Attila Nagy
New Member
It does not work on Windows10. but I have it installed on many Windows 7 computers for Cut and Rip/Print as well.
Texas_Signmaker
Very Active Signmaker
Oh yeah maybe it's 7.
jcskikus
Owner, Designer & Installer
I had a pirated version of FlexiSign & Print ver.8.6v2 running on Window XP, 7, then 10 for years. Wasn't until 2014 that I jumped to a legit version of FlexiSign.
WildWestDesigns
Active Member
Luddites actually weren't against tech and/or wouldn't use it, they were against how tech was being implemented.
That is true, but one also has to worry about the hardware that one is trying to keep alive those production machines. Firmware support can be a thing (although there could still be ways, I run plotters that have no officially supported drivers on my OS of choice and still able to run them, so there is that, but that does have some teething pains).
Why not the virtual machine? That is a viable option. Have the ability to have what one knows works the OS in question (and passing through a serial/parallel port is very doable in a VM, I have passed GPUs through to VMs(when there were 2 of them on a system that is)) while to still be on current computer hardware, while only having the footprint of one machine. The biggest issue is hardware resources, but using something like XP, that's not like running the even more bloated current OSs that are out there now. Shoot, on a modest spec computer, I was able to run the host OS, a guest of Vista and with that guest of Vista run another guest of Win 98 (most hypervisors stop at XP for currently supported OSs, I think even VMWare has deprecated support of 98).
But as long as the computer doesn't need WAN access, it doesn't matter what's on it (why I hate the current SaaS model of software). So what if there is an older OS running? Depending on what the stuff is, I actually prefer an older OS, especially an OS that doesn't have any ability of outside traffic and if a person wants to do something bad with it, they have to have physical access right there at the machine. Being on the latest and supposed "greatest" isn't always the best. I see more examples of it not being the best versus the opposite.
Windows 7 is just as dead (as far as official support) as XP right now. Just moving on up to something that hasn't been dead long isn't going to help the situation.
32bit as a whole is also a dead arch when it comes to Windows. I do not think any new computers or ISOs are being delivered with 32 bit anymore thru official channels. So anything that depends on libs that aren't also included with 64bit system (say for instance, a program that may have a 16bit installation stub, but is otherwise 32bit program wont install as there are no 16bit libs on a 64 bit machine, not officially, there are OSS projects to get those back in) are going to have a hard time getting on 64bit systems, unless something more technical is done (in the case of the previous example, swapping out the 16bit stub with a 32bit one).
Shoot even distros like Ubuntu have dropped 32bit, I think 6 yrs ago. So if needing to run 32bit, not going to be on modern hardware either. More modern compared to XP, but it's quickly fading, so if the goal is to go modern and making that switch now, I would bypass the 32bit, but by doing so, probably have to make other changes as well and that leads back to either keeping an older computer or running it on a VM.
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