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[LitusSaxonicum]

I agree with John. Clearwin is usually lightning fast, and I don't find any cause for complaint that isn't ultimately the fault of what I've done, or with a particular machine's configuration.

However, Windows is a "moving target" - or actually, a large set of targets - and there are bound to be cases that are forever insoluble. The best solution is usually to swap to a machine that works! THis is far cheaper in the short term than struggling to find the answer, although if in the long term more and more machines are going to give the problem then finding the answer is de rigeur.

Eddie

[JohnCampbell]

Paul,

I agree with John. For us who want to program in Fortran, Clearwin+ is a very good solution. While I have only learned to use a small part of it's functionality, I am very happy with it's capability.

The limit is not Clearwin, it's our ability to use it. It's a great product

John

[lozzer]

Latest on this situation:- NVIDIA have accepted that there is a bug in their latest drivers on computers running the latest NVIDIA cards with Windows XP Pro SP3 (official Operaqting System downgrades because many IT departments don't trust Vista or Win7).

However, it's 2 weeks since they acknowledged the problem and they have stopped responding to my calls for progress updates.

We cannot wait for these large organisations to help us, so have been spending the past 2 weeks re-writing our program interface to use icons instead of bitmaps.

This is an unnecessary use of everyone's time, but at least we're less reliant on third parties while we're doing it and we're learning lots about Windows API calls along the way. Our early tests show that the program will look more polished with Icons instead of bitmaps for buttons, so I guess that this particular cloud may have a silver lining after all.
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Lozzer

[LitusSaxonicum]

Nigel,

When something that works effectively is broken in the interests of “progress”, and I get irritated by it, I have always found consolation in re-reading Rudyard Kipling’s “If” (specifically the penultimate line of the second verse) and in knowing that I am not alone. More fortunately than Kipling, we have FTN95 and Clearwin, which are rather better than his “worn out tools” to do the rebuilding job.

(The first two lines of the poem ring true as well !)

Is it really unreasonable of nVidia not to be interested in supporting drivers for new hardware for an OS that was replaced 3 years ago? How big a proportion of their market can it be? I say this as (still) a user of XP. At my University, “downgrades to XP” are regularly done, as some software that is essential (notably for distributing and tracking software licensing info) does not work properly with the latest Windows. The complementary problem of not being able to get drivers for old hardware to support new versions of Windows is equally irritating but is also a fact of life. Between these two latter problems, sticking with XP is the sensible course for large organisations. The problems you report represent the ”other side of the coin”, and if they accumulate then they force a major change with wholesale renewal of hardware as well as of software. The costs and disruption of this are huge - they were huge when we moved to XP.

I would be interested, as I suspect others might be, to know how you replace bitmaps with icons for your toolbar(s). Some time ago I wrote a demonstrator which proved to me that it was possible to have dockable (repositionable) toolbars (yes, with mouseover sensitivity) and fly-out toolbars too, provided one was prepared to program all with IMPORT_IMAGE@ in one big %gr region that also encompassed the toolbar areas. The only time I found the need for ADD_GRAPHICS_ICON@ and REMOVE_GRAPHICS_ICON@ was to show the moving toolbar and then hide it when it was docked. (I also found that this approach provided somewhere to put a “thumb pad” bitmap in the bottom RH corner of the application window!). I decided that the time to change a specific application was more than I was prepared to invest, and the demonstrator remains just a “proof of concept”.

It would be equally interesting to know if your client’s machines suffered the slowdown problems when configured originally with Vista or Windows 7. I suspect not.

I have recently been reading the Windows User Experience Design Guide on MSDN, and note that the Office 2007 “ribbon” code is available for free (provided one does not use it to compete with the 5 major Office applications!). This seems to require switching to .NET to implement. As a dilettante programmer, I can ignore such things. Can they be ignored by those of you in the commercial world? Again, I suspect not.

Based on my experience of how snotty students can be about software provided for free that they only have to use for a few days, I can imagine how demanding paying customers (who rely on said software for their business) must be.

Eddie