Author Topic: Still Running Strong on Windows 7 (for now) and Thank You Corey  (Read 843 times)

thecovesf

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Still Running Strong on Windows 7 (for now) and Thank You Corey
« on: November 09, 2019, 01:11:20 PM »
First and foremost, I'm now in the middle of running my 14th Season of a poker league and we've been using Tournament Director since the beginning.

As with any software there are always issues but I never had any "fatal" issues that stopped any of my tournaments cold (that sound you hear is me furiously knocking on wood right now). This program has been a life saver and really does everything I need it to do. Thanks Corey!

I'm still running TD on a Windows 7 PC which is soon going to lose support from Microsoft. My laptop is a gaming PC so its fine running the software. I love Win 7 but realize I need to update soon. When I get a new laptop, I'm thinking of running TD within an emulation of Win 7. Has anyone tried this before? Anything I need to be aware of?

Or should I just run TD on the latest Windows build?

Thanks!

Corey Cooper

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Re: Still Running Strong on Windows 7 (for now) and Thank You Corey
« Reply #1 on: November 10, 2019, 12:39:03 PM »
I still do my main development on Win 7.  Not for any specific reason other than it's my desktop and when I bought it I basically tried to future-proof it by getting a pretty good CPU and ample memory.  It is now 8 years old and I have yet to find a reason to upgrade to a new one.  I have added memory, replaced and added many hard drives, replaced the video card twice, replaced one monitor, replaced several printers, and I am about to replace a BluRay drive (for almost the sole reason of ripping dance videos of my daughter that are only available in that format).  But as far as the CPU, advancement simply doesn't come at the same pace anymore and my desktop still outperforms all the newer PCs/laptops I've used during that time period.

I decided against the Windows 10 upgrade during that period when MS offered it for free, if for no other reason than the inability to schedule my own updates/restarts.  My wife's Windows 10 laptop has been automatically restarted almost every time I use it, which is roughly once every 7 to 10 days.  Anything I left open at that time is lost.  And my work model is to leave everything up and running so I can jump back in at any time without much overhead.  Having all my windows closed automatically and having to reopen everything all the time would drive me bonkers.  I've tried many methods to prevent this on her laptop but none have worked.  I use Windows 10 in my day job work environment.  But in a corporate env, IT can control updates.  So while updates get installed automatically, it happens far less frequently.

If XP was any indicator, Win 7 support isn't likely to end in January.  But only time will tell.

Anyway, all of that said, I wouldn't necessarily recommend sticking with Win 7.  Like I said, I use Windows 10 otherwise and aside from the automatic restarts, I like it and would probably upgrade given the free option again.  TD version 3.7 is built using much more modern code, and while Windows 7 is supported, I imagine unlike the old TD framework, Win 7 support will end much sooner, so using the latest Windows would be my recommendation.

TL;DR
Recommend using the latest Windows.  Others have certainly run the TD in a virtual machine, and I test it on other versions of Windows using VMWare.  But there's an overhead to that and it will almost certainly run more sluggishly in a VM.  So why do it if you don't have to?