Ok, you guys are raising more questions in my mind about a laptop I want to buy. My genealogy program is 1995 vintage Family Roots (DOS). I have resisted changing it all these years but now I am being forced to convert to probably FTM which I also have. (The laptop is 64 bit & FR4 is 32 bit & will not work on it). BUT my version of FTM is last year's 16. So will 16 work on the laptop which is 64 bit & Windows 7? Where does that leave me? Please help!

Joan Marie

msjoantoni

Version 16 (two years ago) should run on your New Laptop. Just remember that you MAY have to install the Vista Patch on the PC. Can't tell, as Windows 7 isn't out yet. (officially)

Version 16 certainly was NOT tested to run under Windows 7. However. the only real issue with a 64 Bit PC is the PDF issue that Vista has in general. The work around for that problem is to select another 3rd Party PDF Generator.

Russ

At this point, if it were me I'd wait until the new laptops with Windows 7 come out (Oct/Nov). You might want to check to see if there is a free upgrade to Win7 if you purchase a laptop closer to Oct when Win7 ships.

Win7 smooths out most of Vista's rough edges and feels noticeably faster (to me anyway) and is much less computer resource intensive. Both Vista and Win7 have a compatibility setting the user can apply to older programs that do version checking, to trick them into thinking they are running on a down-level OS (Vista, Win2000, Win9x, etc).

64-bit Windows editions (XP, Vista and Win7) have an emulation layer that allows it to run 32bit software. Most of my software is pretty mainstream, but I haven't hit anything yet that couldn't be run natively or via the compatibility setting changes. The nice thing about 64-bit software and operating systems is that you can use all the RAM on the box. 32-bit operating systems are limited to about 3.5GB of RAM (possibly wasting 1/2 GB RAM which could be put to good use - you paid for it, so you may as well use it).

FTM2010 runs just fine on Win7 x64. Others have run FTM16 under Vista x64 using the compatibility settings and report it works well.

Hope this helps.

I have been running Windows 7 (32 bit), release version for a couple of weeks now. It was officially released August 6, but it's not available to everyone yet.

Family Tree Maker is the *only* program I can't get running, even in compatibility modes for XP and Vista, or running as an administrator. Yesterday I installed the Windows XP virtual machine (known as XP mode) so that FTM would be running inside a pure Windows XP environment. However FTM fails to install properly as Installshield reports a 1628 error some way into the process.

Thanks for your replies. They are re-assuring. Yeah, I have been advised to wait until I can buy an already installed Windows 7, but I am 76 and have already waited until now to get high-speed so, of course, I want my laptop like the day before yesterday! Besides I like Costco's $549 price good until Sept 6 - w/free upgrade.

It sounds like you are saying that even the 64-bit Windows editions (mine would be Vista) will let me run my 32-bit ancient program. Do I have that right? I dread having to do audits, GEDCOM, & conversion to FTM because I have customized my old program so much.

Joan Marie

Mike,

For clarification, I saw in another thread you are working with FTM2008 under Win7 RTM (32-bit). Is that correct?

I had no problem with FTM2009 under Win7 beta 2 or RC (32-bit). And currently have not run into anything with FTM2010 and Win7 x64 RTM.

Interesting to hear you tried the XP VM and it didn't work for you because of the installer. Good to know.

If it's the Family Roots DOS program you are calling the 'ancient one' then that's probably a 16-bit program.

FTM2008 was mostly OK under beta 2 and RC, but not under release version. I was able to reinstall but it still "crashes" halfway through the splash screen initialisation. The main UI comes up most times along with the dialog saying that it has encountered a problem and needs to close. You can do some browse operations as long as you ignore the error dialog, but it's very fragile and crashes fully when an edit or other operation is done.

I suspect it's because it doesn't play well with user permissions for files/folders/registry. Else it's some internet access stuff. I tried turning off the internet features, but this state does not persist, and FTM goes into online mode immediately on restart.

I contacted TGN support and could have supplied them with the debug information that Windows provides, but they were not interested. Count me as now recommending against FTM to friends.

Sounds like you've done your due diligence. About all that's left is to dig in with the SysInternals tools, but that's a lot of effort to get them info for a product that's now a couple of years old.

I'm not surprised they have a low interest level in supporting FTM2008 any longer since it's a couple versions back and can't be purchased in most sales channels any more. Many companies (like Adobe) you are lucky to get 1 patch per release (ie Photoshop). I'm sure Adobe has tons more resources than the FTM team does for maintenance programming. I didn't see Adobe scrambling to provide backwards support for earlier versions of Photoshop when Vista rolled out (though myself and others would have liked it). As I recall, Adobe provided a patch for just the current version) and promised to fix any other issues in the next version.

I'm also not very surprised by FTM2008 issues under Win7 as it's pretty well documented on the forums it had some stability problems even under supported OS's.

The problem under the Win7 XP VM surprises me though. I thought that was supposed to handle all the XP-only stuff. I guess not. It appears InstallShield is at fault there.

I'm glad the FTM team seem to have gotten the problems fixed in later versions of FTM.

I like many many others am waiting for the promised email with the free upgrade to 2009.

If there weren't so many feature-related problems with v2009 ... Since random useful features get taken out of various FTM releases with alarming regularity, there is little incentive to upgrade until your favoured feature returns. Your transmission may work better but two of the wheels are missing...

FTM2008 is only 2yrs old, which makes it one of the newer programs I'm running, but as you say, it's never been great on the systems it's supposed to support.

Installshield itself may not be at fault - someone has to program the setup script and it's quite likely that whoever did it for TGN made the same sort of errors with access rights as were made in the main program.

If TGN had a professional software engineering approach then they would be looking to find out what's going on under the hood here and learn from it.