Thanks Anne! I chose 32 in the end. Or rather, after a couple of near duds, found a hard drive that would successfully run the 32-bit system I already had a Ghost backup of. I had done something risky: upgraded a dicey Vista to Win 7 on the theory that the upgrade would sort out the problems. It took several tries to get the upgrade to work. But the gamble seems to have paid off - - except that I lost a couple of weeks on two bad interim hard drives. I've now been running everything I normally run solidly for 48 hours, so all seems well.
It's great to hear that 64-bit development is in hand at NotaBene. Going forward, how will NotaBene deal with Unicode/OpenType, etc. fonts? Or is that too contrary to established user workflows?
Is there a possibility NB will ever might support contextual substitution the way that Quark and InDesign do? I've always thought it a pity that, as the XyWrite-engine is so close to achieving book-quality production formatting, it never went the final mile.
One thing I did learn - - you can't boot Win 7 onto a GUID disk unless you have an EFI bios. Well, apparently there is a way, discovered by the hackintoshers, but I didn't want to spend the time/risk.
Mike, I'll take your advice on my next system - - I only have a max of 4GB now - - although there are claims the Dell 1720 will actually use more.
Rick, that link is very interesting. My laptop is now just a couple of months shy of its 2nd birthday, but I don't think it has a virtualization option in the BIOS. Regardless, I am reasonably convinced I can run Virtual XP.
Finally, the two best things I learnt from various fixit gurus: (1) always make sure your hard drive connectors are seated properly, and reseat if you think you have a problem, as it shifts the corrosion. (2) If you have an external hard drive problem, it is more likely to be due to the power supply than to the hard drive. You can easily get disk movement, but not have enough power to get reliable performance. Change the power adapter and you may be surprised that everything is fine again. (And 2a, if you have to run chkdsk a lot, and it looks like new bad sectors are not coming up, so you think the disk might be OK and the problem is elsewhere, then the likeliest problem is still that the disk needs to be replaced.) (And 2b, if you need to convince your warrantor that a hard disk needs replacement, and don't want to spend four hours with tech support while it is tested, simply disconnect the power connector on the hard drive. Nothing trumps the 'drive not found' message.)
I'm going to chicken out of extra partitioning this time around, but the basic theory is,
1. Win 2. Programs 3. User files- - is that correct? Because I do want to do this going forward. I've had a big scare, and really want to take better steps to ensure my data's survival for the future. If only there wasn't so much of it!
Many thanks to all - - - Bill
