In article ,
Clive Page wrote:
On 10/04/2012 18:22, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Only COMPILED programs may not copy. Data is - just data. I mean I copy
those freely between a 32bit XP virtual machine and a 64 bit Linux..

Indeed. My experience is as follows.

My old laptop started having problems last year and I found that it was
hard to avoid getting 64-bit Win7 on any reasonable replacement, so I
gave in and did that. I found that the only *program* that didn't work
was something called Turnpike (a very good reader for Usenet News).
This used some features of 32-bit windows which weren't in the 64-bit
version, and was also a "mature product" i.e. no longer being developed
for new operating systems. All the possible work-arounds turned out to
be dead ends. There is a Win XP mode in Windows 7 but it can't be used
in Win7 Home Premium; you have to pay Microsoft an extortionate fee to
upgrade it. Eventually I switched to using Thunderbird for news reading
(it isn't as good, but I can live with it).

But printer drivers are also executable code, and I found that my new HP
laptop would not work with my existing HP laser printer, because HP
could not be bothered to create a 64-bit printer driver for it. It
won't even drive it over the home network when the old printer is
connected to the old Win XP computer which surprised me. Obviously HP
are trying very hard to get me to buy a new printer. Again I eventually
found a work-around, but it's clunky. As a result of my HP experience,
when I do get another printer, it certainly won't be from Hewlett Packard.

HP have a "universal printer driver" which I am using, rather than one
dedicted to a particular printer. It seems to have all the facilities that
I need.

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From KT24

Using a RISC OS computer running v5.18