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Author: Evgeniy Kozhemyak
IntroductionAll the IT world and common users have waited for the release of Windows Vista for years. Finally, Microsoft made all happy. On January 30, 2007, the release of the long-awaited Windows Vista was launched. But those who are using Windows XP are not hasty at purchasing the new operating system - they are thinking twice as to if all the programs they are using in Windows XP and earlier versions will run trouble-free under Windows Vista. The developers were doing their best to create a more secure and stable operating system, which moved some programs to the list of the incompatible software. The major cause of their incompatibility is use of insecure and unreliable enough technologies. We believe it is quite a just decision. Why do we need applications which may allow for installation of malicious software or result in periodic failures in the operating system? The goal we pursued in this article is to tell the future buyers and users of Windows Vista on the compatibility of popular applications to the new operating system. Since many software developers released new versions of their programs simultaneously to the release of Windows Vista compatible to the operating system, we decided to test a few outdated versions of programs. That was done to check those versions to which many have got used to and in order to represent a more general idea of the situation. We checked all the processes visually - from installation to the the validation of features up to the uninstallation. If the system displayed a message of incompatibility and suggested to proceed, we continued. If a program added any "malicious" drivers or services into the operating system, we installed the program only for the purity of experiment on a clean operating system. We did not look for any solutions in the Internet even when Windows suggested that we should do that. Let's get down to describing the process of testing the programs.
Testing the programsOFFICE APPLICATIONS Microsoft Office XP, as its later version Office 2003, did not cause any issues during installation and operation, and uninstallaiton also ran correctly. Perhaps their complete compatibility is because they were created by the developer of Vista. In almost any organization of Russia, accounting and inventory transactions are performed with 1Ñ. We couldn't help passing by it. 1Ñ: Predpriyatie 7.7 (build 7.70.027) was running trouble-free at all the stages of tests. So were Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 which passed all the tests. Socrat Personal 4.1 (translation program) caused a server registration during installation and on uninstallation, but despite that it did its major job. Punto Switcher 2.9.9, on the contrary, installed correctly but did not fix the texts typed in a wrong keyboard layout. INTERNET The all-known mail client TheBat! 3.60 did install but on launch it reported compatibility errors and hung sometimes while connecting to the mail server.
By the way, on the moment of writing the article Ritlabs S.R.L. announced having released a new version fully compatible to Windows Vista. The new compatible version of TheBat! causes no issues. FlashGet 1.70 and the Internet browsers Opera 8.50, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 caused no issues, nor did the programs for Internet communication: Rambler-ICQ, QIP 2005 (Build 8000) and Skype 2.5.0.130. The popular FTP-client CuteFTP Pro 7.1 closed periodically during operating without any warnings. ARCHIVERS WinRAR, WinZip, and 7-Zip did their job packing and unpacking files in various modes. MULTIMEDIA Multimedia programs like Winamp 5.1, CyberLink PowerDVD 5.0, WinDVD Platinum 6.0.6.56, Light Alloy 4.0, and QuickTime 6.5.2 played audio and video files trouble-free, but QuickTime wouldn't uninstall in the regular way. During installation, Sound Forge 8.0b asked for the installation of Microsoft.NET Framework version 1.1. It wouldn't install even though Windows Vista has a newer version. The probable cause of that is lack of succession in NET Framework versions, but we did not install version 1.1. VIDEO PROCESSING All the tested applications for creating and processing films were running correctly. We verified the following programs: Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0, Adobe After Effect 6.0, Pinnacle Studio 8.4, and Ulead MediaStudio Pro 7.0 GRAPHICS Adobe Photoshop and CorelDraw are regarded as the most popular programs for handling raster and vector graphics. Their versions CS 8.0 and 12.0, respectively, are compatible to Windows Vista. We paid enough attention to them the make sure they worked correctly and stably. Not all the features of 3DS Max were operative and on closing it the application reported missing components. No issues were found in Xara3D 6.0 and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0 (to create 3D texts and web pages, respectively). ACDSee 8.0.39 worried us with a lot of errors both during installation and on attempts to launch. On the other hand, the integrated viewing and editing features are quite enough. ANTIVIRUSES Frankly, we did not expect compatibility from antivirus programs at all, which was confirmed by the tests of outdated versions 5.0.237 and 6.0.0.300 of Kaspersky antivirus. But we also tested the most recent versions Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.2.614 Vista, Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0.2.614 Vista and they showed quite a stable operation in Windows Vista. GAMES "Heroes of annihilated empires", "Hitman Contracts", "Constantine", and "Moorhuhn Winter» - these are games which installed and were running successfully. "Diablo II" also installed and was running despite the compatibility error upon the start-up. The popular arcade "Need for Speed Carbon", unfortunately, wouldn't start up after the installation and asked for DirectX 9, although Windows Vista DirectX is already of version 10.
FILE MANAGERS Of the file managers, we checked Far 1.705 and Total Commander 6.53. The only found issue in their operation - they wouldn't open some protected directories - perhaps the enhanced security of the new operating system caused that. CD/DVD The popular program for recording CD/DVD discs proved incompatible, was abundant with errors on installation, launch, and even upon uninstallation. These errors were caused by Nero Premium 7.0.1.2
The first place at destabilization of Windows Vista can be given to Alcohol 120% 1.9.5.3105 that emulates CD/DVD disks. During the installation, Vista reported that it couldn't verify the publisher of the installed driver. After the attempt "to install the driver anyway" Windows Vista showed a "blue death screen", returned error 10000007å and rebooted. We were able to recover Windows Vista only using the last most successful configuration. PROGRAMMING Delphi 7 and Turbo Pascal 7.0 did not cause much of any issues neither during operation nor while running the programs. This should be a good news for programmers. UTILITIES Utilities in Windows Vista were not running correctly. Perhaps they access the hardware passing by the system drivers or introduce changes to the system registry. For example, the system even wouldn't let RegCleaner 4.3 start up. SpeedFan 4.23 was running but periodically closed without any warnings. HDDlife Pro 2.5.74 was unable to detect disks that support the S.M.A.R.T. technology and it wouldn't uninstall from the system.
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