Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9
#11
  Re: (...)
Just curious if anyone has loaded Mastercook V8 or v9 on Windows 7?

Good/Bad experiences?
Erin
Mom to three wonderful 7th graders!
The time is flying by.
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#12
  Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by esgunn (Just curious if anyo...)
I'll be interested in your responses. We're in the process of selecting a new laptop and we can't get XP anymore... Mastercook isn't the most important app for us, but it would be nice if it works okay in a different platform.
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#13
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by HomeCulinarian (I'll be interested i...)
If you can get your laptop custom installed at a computer shop, instead of going to a store where everything is pre-boxed, you can probably have them install XP for you.

Another thing: Do NOT buy a Dell laptop. Especially over the two years, I have lost count of the number of people I have had to help with Dell laptops, including one person who has had serious hardware problems for two years, but because of the extended warranty that was purchased along with the laptop, Dell STILL refuses to replace the computer since they have always been able to send someone out to repair it, even though it CONTINUES to have problems. So far, with that computer, the keyboard, monitor AND motherboard have ALL been replaced! There isn't much left that belongs to the original laptop, but various hardware-related problems still persist. Again: DO NOT BUY A DELL!!!

Many people really don't need laptops, and fail to realise that desktop computers are really more appropriate for their usage, but if you MUST buy a laptop, get a Toshiba or a Sony Vaio, and steer well clear of Dell or Gateway. HP is okay, but I would really opt for their desktops rather than their laptops, whereas the Sony and Toshiba seem to be more reliable for laptops.
If blueberry muffins have blueberries in them, what do vegan muffins have?
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#14
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by labradors (If you can get your ...)
Good advice, Labs. Thanx. I'll consult with our experts in the IT department before purchase. Hubby likes Macs, but they cost a lot more. I have an IBM from work that has been great.
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#15
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by HomeCulinarian (Good advice, Labs. ...)
Macs are wonderful, but are not for everybody. IBMs are a mixed bag. I've seen some that were great and others that were duds. Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell which is which before the purchase.
If blueberry muffins have blueberries in them, what do vegan muffins have?
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#16
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by labradors (Macs are wonderful, ...)
Labs, I have to disagree with you on a couple of counts. One, in my family we all have laptops as well as desktops and use the laptops constantly. I do most of my forum reading on my laptop while watching TV. I realize we are an unusual family in that we have used computers since the early 1970's (I recently disposed of my first, a real IBM with DOS). For Christmas, we had DD and her husband (he's a computer prof at MIT, my son (a PH.D. candidate in computer science at USC), his girlfriend, my stepson, DH and I all in the family room. We were watching the football games and checking our mail, etc. all on laptops, sending each other funny links, sale items, etc. Second, as I said, I've used computers forewver, both at home and at work and have had pretty much all brands. I currently have HPs both laptop and desktop (both personal configurations). I highly recommend them. Excellent customer service (I changed my mind about a configuration right after I bought the desktop, my fault, they fixed it) and they work well. I currently have 7 on both, but had XP and Vista before (I do love 7, no problems so far that make me want to switch back to XP.). DH has a Sony laptop and one of his desktops was a Sony as well, he's not been happy with all the proprietary stuff, a pita. I do agree with you about Dell. For desktops, DH. DS and DSIL pretty much build their own, get what we want and only that (I have done it, chose not to bother this when I was able to configure my HP with what I wanted). The kids all have Mac laptops and desktops (with virtual Windows) as well as built PCs.
I switched to Living Cookbook because it works great on 7, and yes MC recipes are fully importable. I have LC on both desk and laptop and use if out of both, doing most of my recipe entry on the laptop.
PS, Both Intel and Apple are coming out with new ones after 1/7 so I would not buy anything before then.
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#17
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by Cubangirl (Labs, I have to disa...)
Quote:

Labs, I have to disagree with you on a couple of counts. One, in my family we all have laptops as well as desktops and use the laptops constantly. I do most of my forum reading on my laptop while watching TV.




That doesn't mean you disagree - only that, for you, laptops ARE appropriate. My statement was not a categorical assertion that all laptops are bad ides - only that they are often chosen inappropriately.

Quote:

I realize we are an unusual family in that we have used computers since the early 1970's



1978 (when computers first became available to everyday people on a truly national scale) was when I started

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(I recently disposed of my first, a real IBM with DOS).



The real cementing of the Microsoft dynasty: when they bought the 1979-developed 86-DOS and made it into MS-DOS and then IBM used it for the "IBM-PC" that was introduced in 1982.

Quote:

I currently have HPs both laptop and desktop (both personal configurations). I highly recommend them. Excellent customer service (I changed my mind about a configuration right after I bought the desktop, my fault, they fixed it) and they work well.



Of the three primary, major manufacturers today, HP is certainly the best, overall, especially their desktops. Although I have, as stated before, encountered some problems with their laptops, they are not usually as severe or persistent as the problems with Dell. The Sony and Toshiba laptops, however, have usually performed better, overall, than the HPs. Of course, these are strictly my observations from the trenches, although they do tend to be shared by many other technicians with whom I have commiserated.

Quote:

I currently have 7 on both, but had XP and Vista before (I do love 7, no problems so far that make me want to switch back to XP.).



So far, I have not encountered 7 directly, myself. I have heard rave reviews from some of the aforementioned technicians I know and profound damnations from others. The profile that appears to be emerging is that if you get 7 on a fresh, newly-configured computer, you'll probably be okay, as long as the devices and programs you wish to use will still function, but if you install 7 on an existing computer from Vista to 7 as an "upgrade," instead of as a completely new installation, you're likely yo encounter problems.

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DH has a Sony laptop and one of his desktops was a Sony as well, he's not been happy with all the proprietary stuff, a pita.



That was always a problem with COMPAQ, too, back before HP bought them out: they would work very well unless you ran into problems with something proprietary. Of course, for the first couple of years before other brands of PC were available, that was also a problem with the IBM-PC. Trust me: you don't even want me to start with the war stories about those. As far as the Sony machines are concerned, I would not get one of their desktops, but I've seen very few problems with their laptops. The Toshiba laptops are where I've seen the best performance and fewest problems, however.

Quote:

I do agree with you about Dell.



They used to be wonderful, but especially went down hill after the "scandal" in which it was discovered that, in their zeal to try to provide better customer service and efficiency, they provided incentives to their reps who were able to finish their customer-service calls in the shortest times. They thought that was an indication the reps were providing better answers more efficiently, but what it really meant is that the reps tried to find ways to end the calls more quickly without necessarily providing any solutions or service. Although they have made many improvements in THAT area since then, they really have never recovered from it fully and, in the mean time, the quality of their actual computers - especially laptops - has gone down.

Quote:

For desktops, DH. DS and DSIL pretty much build their own, get what we want and only that



Great idea! It can also be helpful for those who are not really ready for Windows 7, yet, and would like to have XP installed.

Quote:

(I have done it, chose not to bother this when I was able to configure my HP with what I wanted).



When you got the HP with what you wanted, did they also NOT install their own "update" package and the other spyware they usually put on their computers to report some of your web-browsing habits and also advertise their other products? HP, Dell, Gateway and Lenovo ALL do that now. The Lenovo netbook is probably as one of the worst for that. A group of doctors and community-development workers here recently started using those, and had me get them all on the same page as far as anti-virus, other security programs, and some applications they all wished to use, and those machines, out of the box would pop up Lenovo advertising every time the machine would connect to the Internet. HP's stuff isn't quite as blatant, but it IS there in their standard configurations, and I always uninstall all such garbage, only leaving an "HP update" if it is directly related to someone's HP PRINTER - not the computer, itself (BTW, although HP DOES have some "cheap" printers that nobody should buy, if you avoid those, you usually won't go wrong with an HP printer - especially one of their laser printers).

Quote:

I switched to Living Cookbook because it works great on 7, and yes MC recipes are fully importable. I have LC on both desk and laptop and use if out of both, doing most of my recipe entry on the laptop.



Did MC not work with 7? After all, that WAS the original question that began this thread. If nothing else, there HAVE been a lot of good comments about LC in recent months. Of course, someone who has already paid for MC will probably want to try to get that working first, instead of buying yet another program, but maybe those who DON'T already have MC should just consider LC right away.
If blueberry muffins have blueberries in them, what do vegan muffins have?
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#18
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by labradors ([blockquote]Quote:[h...)
Labs, to answer your questions about spyware and the like. Having a lot of family computer techies (read nerds) around me (my best friend at work was the head of IT) and being one myself, I get rid of all that stuff asap. I reformat my drives regularly as well. I went from Vista to 7, but chose to do a clean install on 7 on both computers as did DH on his. Makes life simpler. I tend to be OCD about lots of stuff besides cooking and backing up my stuff is one of them. Though a therapist by training, I earned my living for a while working with very large databaseslinked to old obsolete glitchy systems, so I learned the hard way. Now that I am retired and it is only my personal and our small web business stuff it is a piece of cake (easier actually than making an excellent cake). So doing a clean install just meant reinstalling my programs. I haven't found any that don't work on 7. The only casualty was my old Jezzball game which won't work on the 64 bit desktop. Does work on the 32 laptop. My laptop was not one of the ones that qualified for the HP upgrade, so I just found a newer model with similar configuration and downloaded the new set of tools. I love the interface and the one stop info and cleanup/backup, no ads. You can choose to share or not and I chose to not. Our home network system is secure both at the hardware and software level and I keep my Norton IS pretty high in security. (DS field of interest is computer architecture and gateways so he set it up originally).
DH's Sony laptop works ok, it just has little annoyances. He's getting a new one soon and is going to a user-configured HP. We have some pretty expensive flash and photo programs for our website that are not Apple compatible, so when those need replacing or we don't need them, we will probably go to Mac's with virtual windows.
BTW, back in 1968 I ran some of my research on a small computer (it was only the size of my dining room, lol). I was so happy to go from keypunching to typing.
I thought the original question was about buying MC9. Given the cost of a computer and the cost of the program however, I would not downgrade the computer OS to make a $20.00 program work.
I hope you get to play with 7. It is so much fun. The thing I enjoy the most is that it works so well with a lot of programs open, so when I use one of DHs still on XP, I get frustrated, and they are not low ram low power pcs.
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#19
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by Cubangirl (Labs, to answer your...)
Cool.

My own, personal computer use is through Linux since there are just so many things that I just cannot do in Windows, but which have been native to Unix (and, hence, Linux) from the beginning. Thus, it will be quite a while before I have any personal contact with Windows 7, and my first contact with it will come in the context of helping someone who is having problems.

It's always difficult dealing with so many Windows users who have chronic cases of gotta-have-the-latest-version-at-all-times-then-wonder-why-it-doesn't-work-itis.

As to Jezzball's not working, games are often casualties of computer upgrades. Sometimes, things get changed sufficiently that deep system calls upon which the game relied no longer function as expected, rendering the game useless. In other cases (especially very common in the earlier PCs), the newer, faster machines run TOO fast, and the game programs may not have any settings that would allow it to adapt, so the program runs to quickly for anyone to be able to play the game. Fortunately, THAT type of problem is not as widespread as it used to be.

I do hope Windows 7 behaves better with lots of programs open, as you said, since it has long been a problem that Windows was never really designed to be multi-task or multi-user, but was adapted up to it (even with the switch from 98 to the NT-based versions), and has a history of memory-allocation problems, many of which have never truly been fixed - only moved. LOL!
If blueberry muffins have blueberries in them, what do vegan muffins have?
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#20
  Re: Re: Windows 7 and MC V8 or V9 by labradors (Cool.[br][br]My own,...)
The reason I am in Windows 7 is my xp computer was older and had gotten viruses more than once. It just wasn't running optimally when the last one hit. We got it functional, but it wasn't going to cut it for our main use computer. I was really hoping to limp along until 7 was a little more proven, but no luck with that one.

Hubby is gone so much and he is our "techie" but just a learn on the fly kind of guy. It just wasn't worth it to be out of commision and not be able to communicate with him. We are not all wireless with phones etc. I am still tied to my computer! I think I will load MC8 and see how it goes. I did end up buying Photoshop elements 8.0 - I was running Vs 3.0 that was about 5 or 6 years old. I just wish I could get my printer running wirelessly. We can get it installed but when the printer goest to sleep, it drops the wireless connection.
Erin
Mom to three wonderful 7th graders!
The time is flying by.
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