Do people still use Windows 7 for microcontroller work?

[peter-h]

When PCs reached 3.5GHz (quad core i7) they could go only sideways, which works only for apps which can run multiple threads concurrently and do something useful with it.

So, yes

For high end CAD/EDA, it is different, potentially.

What may drive a move to win10+ is indeed motherboard availability, but right now I can buy 10-20 year old MBs on Ebay, which I do very occassionally to fix some old test rig when I want zero hassle. I doubt any MBs are made now which support XP.

Also I run a pile of XP VMWARE VMs which work perfectly for the old apps like Protel PCB 2.8 (yes ex 1995 and still great!) and Corel Draw 11.

[jwet]

I have a few machines around.  For anything that touches the web, only 10 and transitioning to 11.

I have a notebook that boosts win7 and I run a couple of old apps on it at times.  It also has Virtual Box that let's me run a copy of XP.  I have two or three old technical apps that never got past XP.  Protel 99, Xeltek Eprom S/W and tool chain that use Autocad LT that feeds into a CAM program for simple CNC.  Until recently, I had a machine setup to boot XP natively because I had a parallel PCI card for 488 and some old NI Labview, but that's machine died and I haven't yet replaced it.  I don't do much 488 and I guess I'll buy a USB dongle if I need to.

Over the years, I've always had machines running 1 or 2 generation old Windows install- but its a huge PIA.

[thm_w]

I have a notebook that boosts win7 and I run a couple of old apps on it at times.  It also has Virtual Box that let's me run a copy of XP.  I have two or three old technical apps that never got past XP.  Protel 99, Xeltek Eprom S/W and tool chain that use Autocad LT that feeds into a CAM program for simple CNC.  Until recently, I had a machine setup to boot XP natively because I had a parallel PCI card for 488 and some old NI Labview, but that's machine died and I haven't yet replaced it.  I don't do much 488 and I guess I'll buy a USB dongle if I need to.

Reported here that Protel 99 works fine on windows 10: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/running-protel-99se-on-windows-10-virtual-machine/

But unless you use it regularly probably best just staying in the VM.

[jwet]

I'll have to try Protel on Win 10- thanks, that's cool.  I have almost gotten proficient at KiCad but miss Protel 99- it really worked well for me.  I have an old LPKF PCB grinder and recently learned that it's two apps will run in Win10 with a modified install process to avoid 16 bit installers.

I also saw somewhere that there is a registry poke of some kind to let Xeltek's eprom programmer run on Win10.  I don't know if it was on this blog or elsewhere.

EDIT- wow, thm_w, Microsoft is a real trigger for some.  Isn't there some kind of medicine for that kind of anxiety these days.  I'm going to try to make the investment to move forward with KiCad but I won't be deleting those old install disks and serial number for 99SE.

[peter-h]

Actually Protel PCB 2.8 (1995) does everything needed for me.

The one thing which is a hassle with it is that DRC often fails on broken ground planes. It just gets the connectivity wrong and thinks there is not when actually there is. Not sure Protel PCB 99 fixed that.

[jwet]

Protel 99SE is basically bug free and crash free for me.  The inertia with cad apps is that I have 100 designs on the old software and I have this debugged data flow from artwork to a package I can send to a board house without any surprise.  I'm not sure exactly why its so important to move forward.

[nctnico]

Define 'moving forward'... new isn't always better and sometimes a step backward. Unfortunately many are obsessed by the latest & greatest tempted by clever marketing and FUD.

[IDEngineer]

Agreed. Long ago I tired of learning "the latest revision" of things, only to find 1) they didn't deliver any improvement in my workflow to justify the time invested to (re)learn them, and 2) they were just as quickly replaced with the *next* revision, making the last one completely unnecessary!

[peter-h]

Yes; I have found that XP works perfectly for all stuff not needing a web browser. If running simple apps it can easily have an uptime of a year or more; I run two "servers" on XP (they deliver specialised data files to another machine) and they run basically for ever (well, until the SSD gets trashed by XP; various previous threads on that one which is why I have just rebuilt a native-XP SSD machine as a VMWARE XP VM under win7-64). XP finished for normal desktop use due to this browser issue (which incidentally also rapidly killed off the Symbian OS on Nokia phones, even the great ones like the 808 with that superb camera) plus the inability to use more than 3.5GB of RAM.

My Protel PCB 2.8 and Orcad/386 do the whole workflow that I need. Of course there are better CAD apps but mostly they are buggered by licensing. I might give Protel 99 another try... and see if it has fixed the DRC.

Win7-64 then picks up and thus far is 100% fine, except where the app specifically won't install; MS VC++ 2022 is one recent case.

One saves a lot of time by not fighting with the latest stuff.

[jwet]

The Access database model in Protel 99 is unfortunate and is the only truly bad feature for me.  I side step it when I create a new project- it gives you the option to just use a file hierarchy.  I can then do sensible things with the data without worrying about breaking the database.

I've used DRC pretty extensively and it seems solid to me.  If you post a situation that will trigger your bug, I can run it and see if its still there.  I run 99SE. There are two post release enhancements that I use, one is a hole size editor that I use that let's you globally edit hole sizes on a project and the other  is a service pack- I believe its a stability fix.  You can find them online.

This "newer is better" is endemic in software generally but CAD software especially.  I don't use any feature that wasn't standard in Office 95 or Autocad LT97.  All the extras that are added are just bloat that make it harder for me to find the core tools.   Its only for web security and the hassle of maintaining old OS platforms that have moved me off these old platforms.  I was happy to upgrade from DOS Orcad (3?) and Tango PCB in the late 80's but since I haven't found much utility in upgrades.  The old model of buy once and use forever doesn't work for software companies I guess- I wonder how it worked in the past?  I've never called a S/W company support line though I have browsed their user community sites- this seems free or near free and I'd pay for access if this made things work for them.  Shelling out a few hundred a month just doesn't work, my work is too inconsistent (by design).  Shelling out a few thousand in a lump can work, I have occasional windfalls, but this model is fading.  The old Eagle model of a mostly workable free/cheap tier and then graduated tiers was pretty good and I tried.  Eagle was just an illogical mess for me- CAD software involves a lot of little operations.  The UI needs to be very clean with symmetrical operations and shortcuts.  I could never get to this level in Eagle and I would forget it between boards.  I don't understand how an open source model like KiCad can survive if a for profit model like Protel struggles.  I do donate to KiCad gladly and am amazed by how far it has come, the only problem with its complete adoption for me is to adjust my tool flow, learn all the pitfalls and get some experience- I've done maybe 6 boards with it.  Dave Jones has put together good content on this and has worked for Altium in the past.  He has given them advice on how to go to market and low end versions, etc.  I don't know why these companies can't just make their offerings match up with the needs of their customer base.  It seems that they identify their customers as either a small company that has one or two seats and can pay a large annual fee or a large company with 20 seats where all this is in the noise.  There is a huge segment of this business like my own where I'm doing a dozen boards a year, writing software, supporting my customers etc.  Its just out of whack.

[peter-h]

I think the old days (1980s etc) it worked because PCB CAD was moving people from drafting film + tape to CAD, and same for circuit drawing. So there was mass adoption and a lot of $$$ was being made, even at $500 per user.

After everybody had moved, say c. 1995, the money stream dried out and companies had to find other ways to make money. So we got a load of crappy buggy updates, each one fixing 10 bugs and introducing 11 new bugs.

Altium's replacement for Protel does way more but they are trying to get 20k from you (last time they phoned me, maybe 10 years ago) whereas Protel 2.8 was about 1.5k. The guy came down to under 10k during the phone call but I still didn't go for it

The business will stabilise at some much lower level than the good old days and at very high price points, and cheap software will dominate the lower end.

Back to Windows, all the time we hear the corporate BS about "security" (when actually most attack vectors are via the browser or email client route, not via somebody hacking your PC from outside and doing super clever tricks to penetrate NAT) most people will just keep upgrading.

I will try out 99SE shortly Thanks massively for the tip about avoiding the stupid crazy client-server model!

[SiliconWizard]

I remember Protel DXP (2004? 2005?), which was pretty good at the time and with significant improvements over 99SE. It also has a better chance of working on more recent Windows.

[jwet]

You make a good point about going from drafting boards to CAD.  You also mention lower end solutions, there is a lower end PCB CAD tier, you're right.  I have looked at these offerings and ran their trials, etc.  There are inevitably a couple of boneheaded features that are hard to get around that keep me from adopting them.  The other issue is that they often become orphanware when their developers realize that their business model is not sustainable in 5 years when I have a lot of time invested.

I can imagine that there are many thousands of man hours in KiCad- at $300K/yr cost of a developer and 20 man years, this a 6 million dollar investment up front and sustaining cost of 1/4 of this.  In order to sell the software for say $2000 initially and $500 per year which I would see as "reasonable" for my operation, it would take something like 3000 users initially and something similar sustaining.  This is break even money.  When they double and triple it to make 60% margins, it breaks- this is where we are.

Open source, volunteer development has limits too.  I'm a Wikipedia fan/contributor but that model is having sustainability issues now.  The enthusiastic college students and hackers that got it off the ground, are now married with 2 kids and are spending their Saturdays at Soccer games rather than pulling Pizza fueled all niters in the basement of their Computer center at their university.

I'll keep searching.  I've worked for some big companies and coughing up big money for software is always hard- even the $10K for Altium.  The problem was that we had hundreds of labs and locations and they all wanted a copy that they would occasionally use.  Some software allowed floating licensing but purchasing would inevitably buy just enough licenses that you'd be guaranteed to be locked out in crunch periods = always.   This tier of software is peanuts compared to Synopsis, etc.  We ran multiple shifts for layout to minimize those licenses.

It will be interesting to see where it settles.

[jwet]

I remember Protel DXP (2004? 2005?), which was pretty good at the time and with significant improvements over 99SE. It also has a better chance of working on more recent Windows.

DXP was a forgettable experiment- pretty unstable/failure to launch and mature.

[peter-h]

Protel SE99 implements split planes very differently to previous versions. Just spent an hour on it and not ready to move to it yet Might do some new design with it, but for sure it doesn't just import older files.

[peter-h]

One fun thing today:

A winXP machine was no longer able to access a Synology NAS drive. Must have happened recently, with a NAS software update. Did some googling and two things changed: XP needs SMB1 plus WS discovery. Now, the internet is full of stuff like you will get hacked immediately but this drive is on an internal LAN, the main router has no open ports, so WTF...

Win7 has no networking issues. It all just works, same as win10+.

[nigelwright7557]

I sell software and quite often get asked if it works on XP.
So many people are still on XP.

I use Win11 for MPLAB X, PCB Design, Microsoft Visual Studio etc.
I use integrated graphics which works fine for my needs.

[peter-h]

They will struggle with using the internet. Not sure if there are any browsers now supporting the current https certificates. AFAIK if you have say Chrome installed on XP from long ago, it will still work, but you will keep getting certificate errors. I have an old Android tablet on which the current Dolphin browser still installs and works but with lots of certificate warnings.

[Gyro]

The safest thing to do with an XP machine is to isolate it completely from the web / local network and transfer files to and from a later windows/linux computer using a USB memory stick. Any earlier than XP, you get tangled up with needing to find drivers but XP will install any random stick. No different really from the way most people transfer waveform captures from scopes.

[peter-h]

The safest thing to do with an XP machine is to isolate it completely from the web

Why? What is the precise attack surface, if on a LAN and behind a NAT router?

I heard a story a few times that windows 2000 goes online and gets infected very quickly all by itself, but a) I've never seen that myself (having done a number of win2k installs as "machine admin" partitions on machines running something else) and b) it sounds too weird.

[nctnico]

The safest thing to do with an XP machine is to isolate it completely from the web

Why? What is the precise attack surface, if on a LAN and behind a NAT router?

I heard a story a few times that windows 2000 goes online and gets infected very quickly all by itself, but a) I've never seen that myself (having done a number of win2k installs as "machine admin" partitions on machines running something else) and b) it sounds too weird.

Only if you connect it to internet directly. There is no problem with a firewall (NAT router) in between. Back in the old days, dial up internet or DSL would connect your PC directly to internet and a newly installed Windows would get infected sooner than you could download & install anti-virus software or updates.  I have witnessed this myself.

[peter-h]

OK; sure. I remember that. It was some 72 byte packet which was sent out everywhere and which exploited some Win95-2000 back door.

Completely irrelevant to anything nowadays, but FUD lives on

[NorthGuy]

100 people have voted. And the results are not what I would expect. I thought that most people would have switched to modern Windows by now, but the number of those who switched is completely miserable.

[SiliconWizard]

Well "only" 25% are still on Win 7.
Maybe what surprises you is that as many have switched to Linux as Mac + Win 10/11.

[NorthGuy]

Well "only" 25% are still on Win 7.
Maybe what surprises you is that as many have switched to Linux as Mac + Win 10/11.

Yes, both Windows 7 and Linux numbers are surprising. I think many Linux people were on Linux from long ago, but I guess it was less than 40% 15 years ago. It would be interesting to track the dynamics year over year.