Advice Requested on Life Expectancy of a PC Windows System

[Antonio Carlini]

On 30/06/15 17:02, Dave G4UGM wrote:
> Well there are other reasons. You buy a new printer and you find it 
> only works on Windows/7 onwards. 

Indeed. The latest stuff is (obviously) only tested against the 
"current" eco-system, so if you find that
you need a new printer or network interface or whatever, then  you may 
be forced into an upgrade.

> Microsoft does things to "persuade" you to upgrade... Lets take the 
> latest Skype upgrade.

Worked with me. I'm running Linux now :-)

Back to the original question. It looks like system (c) is the most 
capable and the most likely "next" platform.

I'd heartily recommend the advice to try out Win98 in a VM. I'd start by 
installing VMWare Player or VirtualBox,
create an empty VM and install Win98. If that goes OK then I'd copy 
across the required stuff bit by bit. (Or
use the VM converter mentioned earlier if that's a suitable choice).

Assuming all goes well then you know that you have a viable upgrade path 
when something eventually goes
irrevocably south with the current system.

You'd also have the advantage of being able to install multiple VMs so 
you could (if you chose) keep your various
uses separate (if that makes sense).

You probably should choose to use a dynamic disk (or disks) in the VM - 
that way you can specify a 100GiB disk size
but the container file will only grow to the size that is actually 
needed. This also makes backups pretty easy: shutdown the
VM and copy the container directory of to somewhere safe.

When system (c) goes bang, you replace the hardware, install VMWare (or 
VirtualBox), restore your VM and away you go.

Antonio