New to Site

Was googling for a way to change the Windows 7 Splash screen and hit on your forum. Found myself reading many informative posts so decided to join.

Before retiring in 2008 I did IT support for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Before that worked as an electronics tech building Nicolet spectrophotometers (). Before that was a Field Engineer for Burroughs Mainframes. At Nicolet I cut my teeth on Mac SEs, the first PCs (IBM and Compaq), PC and MS DOS, and Windows Versions 1 and 2 (I desperately needed my PC to do CUT and PASTE like the Mac could). Yes, I am older than dirt.

Here at home we are running XP, Vista and Windows 7 and, so far, I'm giving Windows 7 a definite thumbs up!

Later...Dave

Welcome to the forum, Monty! We sure can use someone of your expertise here. I'm mostly running Windows 7 now, except one laptop that dual boots Win 2K Pro & Windows 7. How long do you think Win 2K will hold up? The official support for it ends in August.

Thanks for the welcome!

Interesting you should ask about Win2K. Just had a friend ask for help on his older Win2K PC and I'm afraid the answer in his case was upgrade or live without. I plan on keeping my older XP machine for a good while so that I can continue to run some of my legacy applications, e.g. MicroGrafx Designer 4.

Dave

Hi Monty - Welcome to w7forums

Not to worry, Monty. XP will be supported until April 2014. After that, who knows? It could actually survive a while beyond that. Some are still running 95 & 98, but that's too old for me or any of my systems. Should Win 2K go down on me, I still have the XP reinstall disc. Windows 7 is my main system, and I would not want to go backwards. But I do like having an older system to mess around with. The main gripe I have with Win 2K is, no matter how much RAM you give it, it takes it. I've never had an OS to fire up that slow on 2GB RAM.

Hi Monty. Welcome to our family. My tuppence. Turn your back on Vista. Without starting a debate in the thread, Windows 7 is so similar (but, imo superior) tha Vista on the same , or another household computer, is a waste of space.
XP is for the diehards. It was, in its day, a great program. It still has attractive features. But look at my case! I have what is known as a Computer illiterate" wife. I am trying to get her to move from her aging XP laptop to one of my windows 7 possibilities. Hard work!!! I am planning, as a last resort, to buy her a new laptop, install Windows 7 with all her private work ready to go, and throw her in at the deep end. Domestic chaos for a couple of weeks, I guess.

Hi Monty, great to have you join us

Hi Monty, just wanted to let you know about a program that may be of interest to you. Being that you're a Pro user, it is possible that you can use Microsoft's free programs, Windows Virtual PC with XP Mode. Your system must be capable of running the program, I think there's a checker to see if your system will run it. What it does is gives you a legal copy of XP Pro SP3, and you run it in your virtual machine. However, stay away from a program called VMLite, a similar program that doesn't require hardware virtulaztion. It is a fair program at best, but it's not like Microsoft's program at all. It is for those whose hardware can't run the real thing. Hope that this post is of use to you.

Hi Monty welcome to Windows 7 forums

Hi Monty and welcome. I am sure you will find this forum very informative. I know I have.