[Framers] FrameMaker 7.2 Not Responding on New PC

[Frank Stearns]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2016, Kevin Ryan wrote:

> Thanks to all for the tips.

Here's one more: get the *free* Oracle VM VirtualBox emulator. There 
are several different versions of hosts and emulations in the 
Virtualbox family; we have the XP emulator running on Win7 Pro.

In the emulator we run several legacy applications, including FM7, 
that either ran poorly or not at all under Win7. (FM7 would work for a 
short while in Win7, but then would get so slow it had to be stopped 
and restarted.)

After a year the emulation environment has so far proven flawless and 
is fast enough to do real-time audio. You can mount file systems 
outside the emulator; and you can copy and paste between apps inside 
and outside of the emulator. The emulator can be selectively connected 
to resources of the host system, such as USB ports. The only flaw is 
that it does not support access to a firewire port.

> persists, I will try the XP mode.

The internal emulations and "compatibilty modes" provided by the newer 
Windows are very hit and miss. Some of the modes that Win7 suggests 
after it "looks" at an old app are completely wrong; or, you sometimes
intentionally run the "wrong" emulation to get something to work. The 
VM approach has proven so much more reliable.

Good luck with it. I remember the panic felt when our new Win7 box 
refused to run our database program (with customer records going back 
to the mid 1970s) and the horror at the thought of a six month project 
to re-build that complex database. It was a bright and sunny day 
indeed when that same old database came right up in the XP environment 
provided by Virtualbox.

Frank

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