Alpha 5 v.9 compatible with Windows 7?

[Jane Fagan]

I am having problems unzipping Alpha 5 v.9 on Windows 7. Does anyone know if Alpha 5 v.9 is
compatible with Windows 7?

[Doug Page]

Re: Alpha 5 v.9 compatible with Windows 7?

Alpha Five v9 is running on many peoples Windows 7 systems. HOWEVER, it is not supported by Alpha Software on Win7. In order to make this work, you really need to understand both the licensing issues and the differences in Windows 7 from Win XP and earlier. Microsoft made a huge change in their security model and it broke many programs. Some were able to be reconfigured and others were not. Alpha can be reconfigured but as I said you should have a pretty reasonable understanding of the differences. The result is that many software developers had to redesign a whole lot or their programs to work in this new model. For Alpha, that was included in V10.

The licensing issues are fairly simple. You have a license to operate Alpha on up to 2 machines that are for your use. Usually this means a development machine and a laptop for doing work away from your regular machine. When the machine was registered, the machine name was sent to Alpha. If your new machine has a different name, then you are going to use up another machine name. No more after this. If you have already registered to another machine then you will not be able to register your new machine if it has a different name. This is why it has been said many times on this forum that it is best to name your new machine the same as the old one and then once the software has been moved over, rename the old machine. If this is the case, you could also contact Alpha to see if they could remove one of the registration if you don't need it anymore.

The Windows 7 problem is a lot more involved. Simply put, in the old Windows versions most software installed in where Microsoft told them to - in the "Program Files" directory. The software would then use this directory and some also created directories below for their own use. MS no longer wants files being changed in these directories and has specified new places for this. Their new security model also stops this from happening and therefore stops programs from working. So the long shot of all this is that you would now have to install v9 in a place other than "Program Files" for things to start working again. If you want to attempt this, there are numerous posts on the forum and as I recall some were fairly specific.

[Jane Fagan]

Re: Alpha 5 v.9 compatible with Windows 7?

If I reinstalled A5v9, would I put it into the My documents folder? Exactly where would I install it to if not to Program files.

I'm sorry for being so dumb!
Jane

[aschone]

Re: Alpha 5 v.9 compatible with Windows 7?

If you re-installed Alpha5 you would typically install it to the the Program Files directory.

However you database would be elsewhere.

[Tim Kiebert]

Re: Alpha 5 v.9 compatible with Windows 7?

I have created a folder in the root directory called MyPrograms as in C:\MyPrograms. I install most of my important apps there.

Then as Andrew said store the actual database files elsewhere and keeping all the files (tables etc) for each application in its own folder. Where does not really matter. Often just where you keep all your other data. Some prefer to create a data folder directly in C:\ so that there is not such a long path name for all the items Alpha has to look up during its operation.