Posted on 11/05/2009 6:18:44 AM PST by Sudetenland
>> Just curious, is Xilinx running well on Windows 7?
No idea. I don’t have the nerve (or the time) to install Windows 7 and find out the hard way which of my programs don’t work. :-)
>> I’m no Windows fanboy, but I really don’t have the problems people seem to constantly complain about.
Ditto. XP running on a Wintel box is just a tool; for me, it happens to be the right tool. YMMV
Is the video chipset on an add-on card or built onto the motherboard?
Ugh... I used Rush as a tongue n’ cheek response to the idea that Mac is a cult (promoted by the poster I was responding too). The point being Rush is unlikely to be part of any cult. Sorry that was missed on you. I wasn’t using Rush as a reason to own a Mac. That would be as brilliant as voting based on how your favorite Hollyweird star votes.
I’m pretty sure Xilinx works on Windows 7; a buddy of mine does a lot of Xilinx FPGA dev and he hasn’t had a problem with his upgrades.
In fact, I have yet to find a single engineering tool that doesn’t run on Windows 7; even my old, DOS based 8051 dev tools still work, through the serial and parallel ports! With Mac, I would have had to buy upgrades of those tools with each significant OS roll; of course, I’d be out of luck considering these tools were obsoleted a decade ago by a company that went out of business 5 years ago... But my PC with the latest MS OS just keeps running.
And as far as schematic capture and PCB layout, I use EasyPC from Number One Systems and it works like a champ. I even loaded the original DOS version to try, and it works great (but version 11 for Windows is infinitely better).
Macs have their place; however, the marketplace has decided that it’s in a narrow niche, and Steve Jobs has decided that he’s happy with that! Witness the high cost of product (even though I’ve seen Macbooks roll off the same assembly lines that build Dells, Toshibas, and Sony laptops, down at Foxconn and Compal), and the constant breaking of backwards compatibility.
The reason Windows is so dominant is that you don’t have to buy everything new each major rev, like you do with the Mac OS. Backwards compatibility is THE KEY to Microsoft’s market domination, and the trouble with Vista (which was, actually, a stable OS even if it was a pain to use) showed just how much pain there is in forcing everyone to release new drivers.
Imagine the pain if the Win32 API was changed...
Mac people like to say “It just works”; yeah, as long as you buy the latest version of all your software. Microsoft folks can say “It still works...:)”
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