Upgrading desktop PC from Vista to Win 7

[jetmorgan]

I'm looking to upgrade the Windows on my home PC. 

 

At the moment I have an old-ish desktop, Dell Vostro, from my workplace which is about 10 years old and running Windows Vista Business, it was being chucked out so I grabbed it for free as my home computer. I'm looking to upgrade to Windows 7 as I can no longer webcam chat on skype, however I have a dedicated slide scanner, Canoscan FS4000US, that will only work on Windows 2000, XP & Vista and not anything after that. 

 

Looking online at second hand Windows 7 disks I notice that there are 3 versions of Win 7, Home, Professional and Ultimate and on the back of the boxes of the Professional and Ultimate versions it has an XP mode. Does this mean that I can run a device that only works on XP on Windows 7 without any problems?

 

And will I also need to upgrade the Vista first to Professional or Ultimate first?

[dhjgreen]

Have you seen this?

https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/canon_fs4000.html

[beast66606]

You can upgrade from Vista to either Win 7 level.

 

Ultimate is really for power users and corporate, professional gives you 32bit XP but this is virtualised - it runs as a separate machine inside Windows 7. Think of it as having a separate XP machine. You will need a reasonably powerful Win 7 machine to run this, needing plenty of memory, disk and CPU power. You will need Windows virtual machine which is no longer supported - all in all a less than ideal route.

 

David ^ ^ has replied while I'm typing this and has made the suggestion I was going to.

[jetmorgan]

Thanks for the Vuescan info I might try that when I get the second hand iMac that I'm planning as I want to move the photography side of things over to Mac and then I might ditch windows PC altogether or just use it for a bit of internet use.

[JJGraphics]

Thanks for the Vuescan info I might try that when I get the second hand iMac that I'm planning as I want to move the photography side of things over to Mac and then I might ditch windows PC altogether or just use it for a bit of internet use.

 

 

VueScan is excellent on Mac and your won't regret moving over to macOS. An iMac will do everything you need without fuss, but if you are serious about photography make sure you get one which is suitably specified, and when you buy it, be careful about secondhand machines offered by private sellers. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, you could end up with a nasty surprise!

 

If you don't want to pay the full price of a new one, rather than risk secondhand, consider a Refurbished one from Apple themselves. The refurbished machines come with a full guarantee and support from Apple, just like a brand-new machine. They have been back to the factory in Cork, fully inspected and any cosmetic or functional parts replaced before they are completely wiped and a brand-new macOS installed. They are then tested and packed. Over the years my clients in the graphics industry bought almost 100 refurbished Macs from Apple in this way and every one was absolutely fine.

 

Look here: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

 

The list of machines available is on the left and changes every day.

 

John

Edited January 13, 2018 by JJGraphics

[jetmorgan]

VueScan is excellent on Mac and your won't regret moving over to macOS. An iMac will do everything you need without fuss, but if you are serious about photography make sure you get one which is suitably specified, and when you buy it, be careful about secondhand machines offered by private sellers. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, you could end up with a nasty surprise!

 

If you don't want to pay the full price of a new one, rather than risk secondhand, consider a Refurbished one from Apple themselves. The refurbished machines come with a full guarantee and support from Apple, just like a brand-new machine. They have been back to the factory in Cork, fully inspected and any cosmetic or functional parts replaced before they are completely wiped and a brand-new macOS installed. They are then tested and packed. Over the years my clients in the graphics industry bought almost 100 refurbished Macs from Apple in this way and every one was absolutely fine.

 

Look here: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

 

The list of machines available is on the left and changes every day.

 

John

Thanks for that, I had looked at Apple refurbished ones but just way too expensive and I'm on a tight budget of about £300-ish. I have found several websites that sell refurb used iMacs so I should be able to find something I can use and I also have a Samsung widscreen monitor, Syncmaster 226BW, which I plan to hook up to it as a second screen. Another option I have thought about is getting a Mac mini. I have had experience of used mac's off Ebay as I bought a G5 powerpc to replace an earlier G5 powerpc that had gone pop and after about a year that one went pop as well.I still have the hard drives from them as they have a load of software on them that I hope to make use of. Adobe InDesign CS4 including Photoshop and Quark Express among others as it was an old machine used at my workplace.

[ejstubbs]

The last refurbished iMac I bought turned out to be "not as described" when it arrived.  I bought it as a 2.9GHz quad core.  Powered the thing on and discovered that the chiselling Irish b*st*ards had tried to fob me off with a 3.1GHz 8-core...

 

The one before that I suspected of homicide - or computercide - for a short time.  My aging G3 iMac (the "lampshade" model) was on its last legs so I bought a refurbed 21" Intel core duo iMac to take over the bulk of the work.  It turned up, I powered it on, all looked fine.  I ran the migration tool that copies all your data, user accounts, config settings etc from an old machine to a new and few hours later I was logged on to the new iMac and it was whirring away like a champ.  It was only a bit later that I discovered that the old one was stone dead.  Wouldn't power on, nothing.  Local Apple fixer declared it uneconomic to repair.  Checking the price of the necessary parts online myself I had to agree.  I gave it away for parts to a chap whose own G3 was sick.  Sad to see the faithful old thing go: it was as if it had hung on to life just long enough to hand my data over to the "next man up".  (Wipes away a tear...)

[Ian J.]

If you can go a step further and have a full virtual machine inside VirtualBox (rather than the XP Mode) then it's possible to channel usb devices directly to the VM via VirtualBox without a driver for the host operating system. I do this on Linux Mint with VirtualBox for an Omron Pedometer that has no Linux driver, but is passed through to a Win 7 VM where the driver resides and it works fine.

[jetmorgan]

If you can go a step further and have a full virtual machine inside VirtualBox (rather than the XP Mode) then it's possible to channel usb devices directly to the VM via VirtualBox without a driver for the host operating system. I do this on Linux Mint with VirtualBox for an Omron Pedometer that has no Linux driver, but is passed through to a Win 7 VM where the driver resides and it works fine.

Thanks for that but that does sound like it's a bit above my knowledge and skill level. A problem I find with modern computing...it's gotten more and more complicated so that only IT experts know how to do things which leaves us lesser mortals, than just want to switch on and get on with things and not find that with updating anything we have to keep changing everything, a bit up the swanny river

[JJGraphics]

Thanks for that, I had looked at Apple refurbished ones but just way too expensive and I'm on a tight budget of about £300-ish. I have found several websites that sell refurb used iMacs so I should be able to find something I can use and I also have a Samsung widscreen monitor, Syncmaster 226BW, which I plan to hook up to it as a second screen. Another option I have thought about is getting a Mac mini. I have had experience of used mac's off Ebay as I bought a G5 powerpc to replace an earlier G5 powerpc that had gone pop and after about a year that one went pop as well.I still have the hard drives from them as they have a load of software on them that I hope to make use of. Adobe InDesign CS4 including Photoshop and Quark Express among others as it was an old machine used at my workplace.

 

 

£300 is unlikely to get you anything worthwhile and will probably not net you anything that will drive that ancient Syncmaster 226BW which dates from around 2007.

 

Older versions of CS will not run reliably on macOS newer than 10.10; older versions of QXP will not run reliably on macOS newer than 10.10.5

 

Many things have changed since the days of PPC-based Macs and unfortunately, much of what you have on those old HDs will probably not be much use.

 

John

[Ian J.]

Thanks for that but that does sound like it's a bit above my knowledge and skill level. A problem I find with modern computing...it's gotten more and more complicated so that only IT experts know how to do things which leaves us lesser mortals, than just want to switch on and get on with things and not find that with updating anything we have to keep changing everything, a bit up the swanny river

 

Even IT professionals have to specialize. I may be more knowledgeable than many, but only within fairly constrained areas (mainly databases, and even then mainly Access which is hardly a 'real' database). I couldn't fix many devices, know nothing of Apple's products, and still struggle with command lines (be they in Linux or Windows, or anywhere else).

[JJGraphics]

The last refurbished iMac I bought turned out to be "not as described" when it arrived.  I bought it as a 2.9GHz quad core.  Powered the thing on and discovered that the chiselling Irish b*st*ards had tried to fob me off with a 3.1GHz 8-core...

 

That is a real bonus when it happens. The ones bought by my clients occasionally had better video cards or more storage than advertised, but the most frequently-seen "upgrade" was more RAM than advertised.

 

John