Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 October 1

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October 1

Windows XP

From a programmer's point of view, what may be Windows XP used for, in 2012? And in 2017? I think, Win32 API programming and web page compatibility testing (older versions of Internet Explorer). What else?
Microsoft will stop XP support in the near future, and I've got an old installation disk, so I think, I might install it on a virtual machine and download the updates while they're still available. But I want to know whether it's worth the effort. I'm at university and have no idea of what OS/field I will work on when I finish (2017). --151.75.35.148 (talk) 01:53, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd certainly keep a VM of it. I've kept a VM of mine (which Microsoft consider a re-install, of which you have only a small number). Firstly, as you say, keeping the OS around for API compatibility is useful. Secondly, as it won't get newer versions of Internet Explorer, keeping XP around lets you test new websites with old (but still very common) browser. As you've already paid for XP, this is a nice-to-have; serious commercial Windows developers usually have one of the MSDN subscriptions which gets them a (non-production, no support) install for every Microsoft OS, so they don't care so much. Another reason is historical preservation (if you're willing and able to sit on that VM for a lengthy time) - some software and hardware will never run on Vista/7/8 etc., so having XP around will keep that software alive. Anyway, disk space is fantastically cheap, so keeping a VM, even if you never use it, will cost you very little. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 02:01, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I, for one, cannot run my Sims game on my 7 installation (unless I run it ridiculously vanilla: no expansions, no custom content), and XP has been the only one I've tried thus far that has reliably run the full game long-term. So, as a Sims programmer (albeit not a fantastic or prolific one), testing objects in an XP install would allow me to more accurately gauge if an object or a problem with the installation is causing crashing. So if you're programming for something that is more stable on an older operating system like XP, it can be of help. I had a 7 partition and an XP partition (and a Mac OSX Lion partition) until my XP partition went kaput because the 7 patition did something it wasn't supposed to do. - Purplewowies (talk) 02:23, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok. What set of snapshots would you recommend? What software do you recommend that I preserve? There are a lot of combinations useful for testing: if I save each service pack in couple with each IE version, that's 9 combinations, and more if I consider the OS updates and the applications. Also, I don't know what programs (that I may want for testing/programming purposes) are likely not to be downloadable in XP version in the long future. --151.75.35.148 (talk) 02:39, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

That would completely depend on your support policy as a developer. If you want to stick to whatever OS/browser Microsoft itself supports (lifecycle policy) then just supporting SP3 with at least IE7 would do. If your users would rather live without security updates than be forced to upgrade, there's no way to tell how much service pack/browser/office combinations you would have to support... Unilynx (talk) 21:08, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

External Hard Drive question & Windows XP question

Hello, I own a 3TB external hard drive from Seagate, and my OS is Windows XP on a laptop from 2006. I was in an IRC chat, and I noticed, while the chat was ongoing, the phrase "does support 2.2TB+ drives". In Googling to find what that means, I saw many results mentioning a 2.2TB limit, but I have no idea if the combination of the 3TB I own and the fact that I still run XP will cause problems? If I was going to have problems, would I have had them immediately upon first trying to use it (I haven't), or will my problem come some time in the future, perhaps when I reach 2.2TB of used space (i.e. 0.8TB free)? Thanks for your help! -- Tohler (talk) 03:29, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately, you may not notice anything wrong until you hit the limit. I suggest a test, where you fill the disk drive by copying files repeatedly. StuRat (talk) 03:47, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

You could also take this opportunity to part ways with Windows XP and 32-bit operating systems, both antiquated. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:43, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

• According to this document, XP won't naturally support a drive that large. The basic problem is that the variables used by the OS to represent partition sizes and address are not large enough to represent the numbers that you get from such a disk. However according to this page, it is possible to install a Seagate utility called DiscWizard that makes the full capacity of the drive available even under XP. Looie496 (talk) 05:56, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

From what I've read about this, the limit is caused by using sector sizes of 512 bytes. However, it is possible to format the drive to something higher like 4096 bytes, and considering this is a 3TB drive it may already be formatted for 4096 bytes sectors. This should increase the limit to 16TB 92.233.64.26 (talk) 20:09, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7

Another quick question while I'm using the ref desk: I prefer XP over 7. However, I know I'm going to have to upgrade to a modern computer (e.g. 2012+) eventually. Is it possible to keep on using XP on a modern computer that would have 7 installed "from the factory" (Dell)? How would I go about doing this, and would I run into any problems or limits? (I think one of them is the limit on RAM 32-bit systems can use) -- Tohler (talk) 03:35, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I split this off as a separate Q. StuRat (talk) 03:40, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's possible. You would need to have the install disks for XP, as you probably won't be able to download it from Microsoft at that point. You will also need a mechanism for controlling which version of Windows boots. Here are a couple approaches:

A) A boot manager can be installed which comes up and asks you which one you want, each time you boot. This might be good if you will be constantly switching back and forth.

B) If you install each version of a different hard disk, you can go to setup when you boot up, and switch the boot drive, to pick the hard drive with the desired O/S. This option would be best if you will use one O/S most of the time. StuRat (talk) 03:44, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

In addition to the RAM (really address-space) issue you describe, you will find it increasingly difficult to find XP drivers for modern hardware. They changed the driver model between XP and Vista, so Vista/7/8 drivers won't work in XP. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 03:45, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

To clarify, this means that, at some point, new devices (like printers) will no longer work when you boot in XP. However, they will work when you boot in Windows 7 mode. StuRat (talk) 03:49, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

At this point the documentation and tools are available to allow you to make Windows 7 behave exactly like XP basically every way that matters, if that is your concern. http://classicshell.sf.net/ being easily the biggest piece of the puzzle. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:59, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Windows 7 has it own boot manager—Windows Boot Manager, which can handle dual booting with Windows XP including booting from different physical drives. Ruslik_Zero 18:51, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

My solution is to run a windows XP virtual computer on my win 7 machine. I use vmware player which is free, just btw. I've actually grown to like windows 7 quite a lot so my xp computer only gets turned on when I'm doing things like programming microcontrollers which only have xp drivers. You could do most things, even play games on sufficiently powerful hardware, but you do take a processor hit from running the virtual machine on top of win 7. But if you are not doing very processor intensive tasks a VM is a great solution, and you can do your processor intensive tasks on win7, which is a better idea anyway since win 7 will have newer drivers and software version and updates. Vespine (talk) 01:53, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Does that approach suffer a performance hit over running XP directly ? StuRat (talk) 02:25, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes it does StuRat, have another quick look at my reply above ;) Vespine (talk) 03:48, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Having said that and mentioning the limitations, there are actually several decent BENEFITS to running a virtual machine. For one, you get one (or just a few) files that represent the whole machine, this makes backups a piece of cake. You can also transfer or copy the entire computer VERY easily, literally like copying a few files. you can keep it on a USB key if you like (obviously the performance won't be great) but you can do it. You can also "snapshot" the configuration once you have it built 'just the way you like it' and revert back to the snapshot if/when you have problems, instead of having to do a full reinstall.. Vespine (talk) 03:53, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

If you're happy running in a Virtual PC, Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate have something called "XP Mode" that runs an XP virutal machine. The intended use is to run certain apps that require XP inside of the machine, and it uses remote desktop-based magic to make it look like it is running on your Windows 7 desktop. However, you can also launch and control the virtual machine directly. XP Mode doesn't require you to have a licensed copy of XP - it is included with Windows 7. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 17:18, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Word PDF Export

I have a Word document that I need to export as a PDF, with its text preserved as text in said PDF. But whenever I go through the appropriate steps, the resulting PDF converts the text to raster images. How can I prevent this? I believe this is something to do with the font I am using, as this does not happen to all the fonts on my computer. Pokajanje|Talk 16:24, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Some fonts are set with font embedding disabled; if Word honours this, then it won't put the font file into the PDF, and would have to either substitute it for another font or rasterise it. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:44, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Here's some info about embedding fonts in Word. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:05, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Bad UTP cable affecting some things more than others

I've got a UTP cable from a room to the router downstairs. The connection sometimes gets slow, an internet speed test gives 1.62 Mbps download, 2.63 Mbps upload to the closest server (same town). That download speed is one fifth of what I normally get and what I still get on the pc downstairs, so I'm guessing it's the cable. Both pc's are plugged into an old hub before the router btw, so there's an inherent limit regardless of my ADSL speed. Unplugging the one downstairs does not improve the situation. What I really don't understand, is why downloading pdf files is slowed to about 30 kilobyte per second, and why wikipedia pages load slow, mostly waiting for bits.wikimedia.org, after which they often appear with much of the layout missing, I guess because the style sheet(s) didn't load. I presume that doesn't happen to everyone with a connection speed under 1Mbps or maybe 300kbps, so why would a noisy cable cause this? ifconfig didn't show any errors or dropped packets. Ssscienccce (talk) 19:50, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

It's going to depend on how the application handles bad bits. For some applications, like streaming video, an occasional bad bit may not even be noticeable, so can just be ignored. For other applications, one bad bit can be a disaster, so error detection and correction methods must be used. This could result in sending the same data many times, then giving up after a certain number of tries. This could produce slow response time and missing elements. StuRat (talk) 21:21, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Bad bits will almost never make it to an application using TCP. There are checksums in TCP and the Ethernet level, and the data will get resent if it is bad. As for the unusual connection issues it would be great if you could confirm it is the cable and not the PC by seeing if the downstairs PC has the same issues when taken upstairs. It may also be a failing port on the hub - try just switching which port you are plugged into, or even bypassing the hub altogether for a quick test. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 13:44, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

That's unfortunate, as fault-tolerant applications don't always need data to be resent. StuRat (talk) 18:13, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Problem went away right after posting (with a little pulling and pushing of the cable). Maybe it's time to finally configure WiFi on laptop and removed the hub. And I really need to review network protocols; guess I can't complain about cisco certificates having an expiry date anymore... Ssscienccce (talk) 00:23, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

StuRat, that's what UDP is for. It doesn't promise to get the data there correctly and in the right order like TCP does, so there is no resending. It's often used for sending video. I'm pretty sure AT&T U-Verse uses something based on UDP multicasting to send live TV out to their devices. I assumed TCP because downloading PDFs or viewing Wikipedia are almost certainly happening over TCP. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 16:31, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Found out it was the hub, not the cable. Finally got rid of it, took some rewiring; 23Mb/s now. Ssscienccce (talk) 11:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Resolved