Windows 7 Support
Last Updated
27 January 2012
This document provides
information about running P Squared Products on Microsoft
Windows Windows 7.
If after reading this document you have any
further inquiries please contact your sales account manager
via sales@psquared.net
or email
support@psquared.net
Click here to see more
our Support Statement for Windows Vista
Microsoft®
Windows 7 was released on
October 22nd 2009 replacing Windows Vista®
as Microsoft's primary desktop Operating System (OS)
Although Windows 7
does look similar to Windows Vista, many of the key
changes and improvements are to the way the graphics and
audio sub-systems operate
and it is in these areas that Vista did have some
shortcomings.
Some of the new technologies that were introduced in Windows Vista are
here to stay such as "User Access Control" which asks
users to enter a password every time a major change is
requested by software so the user can check to see if it
should be allowed to happen. Under Windows 7 it is now
much more configurable, so many of the issues that we as
application vendors faced are resolved, and we are
working to improve the way we store settings and other
data to work within the UAC model. An example of
this is that all new products and tools for existing
products are being developed from scratch to use
configuration files and local data files rather than the
Registry as this is now off-limits to users.
Prior to Windows 7's
release, we had been actively
developing and testing our software on Windows Vista for
over 2 years, but when the expected release date of
Windows 7 was published we took the
decision to start testing on Windows 7 as well.
We
therefore built a new rack of identical test machines and
installed Vista on one half and the latest Beta and then
Release versions of Windows 7 as they became available. We also
ensured that we have the latest compatible versions of
all hardware drivers, and also applied all Windows
Updates.
The results of this testing
are quite dramatic: although system stability was rock
solid on both Windows Vista and Windows 7, Windows 7 was
noticeably faster to boot, faster to actually operate
and provided much more reliable audio playback under
heavy load. In fact, many of the audio glitches that
were found on the Windows Vista PC's could not be
replicated on Windows 7 at all.
Our original plan had been to
switch to Windows Vista as our preferred OS once Vista
Service Pack 2 was made available, but it was around
this time that Microsoft confirmed to it's Partners that
Windows 7 was due imminently.
We therefore took the
decision to remain with Windows XP as our preferred OS
and skip over Vista straight to Windows 7 once it had
proven itself after release.
Normally we wait until at
least the first Service Pack of any given OS before
supporting our products on it, however Windows 7 can
largely be considered "SP3" for Vista, so therefore we
reducing our normal delay.
We are always very cautious of
such a big change so there was several months of
extensive testing at P Squared once the Full Release of
Windows 7 became available.
We are confident in
the stability of our products on Windows 7 and our
ability to provide the very best Technical Support and
we now recommend Windows 7 as the OS of choice
for new installations. We also ship
Windows 7 as standard on all PC's except where requested
by the customer.
We have no plans to remove
support for Windows XP in the near future, though
inevitably we will eventually downgrade it to
"unsupported". We are expecting that this will not be
for at least 12 months after we start supporting Windows
7, and even then it just means that we are unlikely to
be able to offer Technical Support for any issues you
have running our software on Windows XP and it's
possible that future Releases or Versions may not be
able to run on Windows XP at all.
(That said, technically
almost all of our products still work on Windows 2000
even though we removed support for it many years ago, so
there is no need to panic!)
It was a very difficult
decision to skip Vista as we invested significantly
in training our engineers and running extensive product
testing on it, but we just can't support every possible
platform. Therefore there will not be any
official support for Windows Vista, and we will not be
able to assist customers with any OS related inquiries.
This doesn't mean
necessarily mean that our products won't work on Windows
Vista, just that we won't be able to guarantee the
stability and reliability.
Almost
all of our current generation products work fully under
Windows 7. Myriad v3.5, Myriad Network v3.5, PowerLog v4 and
Nexus v1 are all fully compatible with Windows 7.
A Beta version of Scoop
v3.0 is now available that is compatible with Windows 7.
If you would like
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