New Laptop

As I mentioned last month, my four years old laptop overworked. Its screen could not display more than one minutes. I must use an external monitor to see. It was my first laptop to fail. My other eight years old Toshiba laptop worked great with email, DOS applications, Windows-based applications, documents, spreadsheets, but not with media web-based applications or games. In the past, I upgraded my computer only when it was too slow and I need a fast CPU and big hard drive to work more efficiency.

At first, I thought I'm going to get a laptop with no operating system or with Ubuntu. I will install Ubuntu 10.04 by myself. Since last year, when I went back to GNU/Linux, I love to use Ubuntu. I used Ubuntu Desktop on daily basic. I also working with many Microsoft applications every day, everywhere. So, it's practical to get a laptop with Genuine Windows® 7, partition its hard drive into two. One for Microsoft Windows® 7. One for Ubuntu 10.04.

My first task: applied all Windows updates on my new laptop. Next, replaced the trial-ware anti-virus software with Microsoft Security Essentials. After installed Microsoft Security Essentials, I installed or updated to the latest version of essential applications:

• Adobe Acrobat Reader. 
• Adobe Flash Player. 
• Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox is my primary default browser. To me, it must more secure and faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer. It's better to have two browsers on your computer.
• OpenOffice.org, a free open productivity suite. My new laptop has preloaded Microsoft Office Starter 2010. I don't use them since it could not open my password protected documents. With OpenOffice.org, I can open any Microsoft or OpenOffice.org documents, spreadsheets, presentations.

In addition to these essential applications above, as a developer, I needed these stuffs to work:

• Notepad++, a free source editor.
• Visual Web Developer® 2010 Express. 
• Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. 
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express.
• Android SDK.
• Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers. 

That all for my Windows 7 partition. I will write about my Ubuntu next time.

Legacy 16-bit DOS Application on Windows Vista 64 bit

Quote from http://www.macvswindows.com/index.php?title=Legacy_Software_Support:

There is no support at all for 16-bit (windows 3.x and MSDOS) programs.

So, we have few options:

• Using Virtual PC 2007 to create virtual machine running DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 98, Windows XP,...
  
• Downgrade to Windows XP. Need more time to build new machine, install new OS and setup
  
• Convert to Windows application using Dot Net. More money to spend.