Total Commander

TC is well known for its support for older Windows versions. It's generally great to be able to use the program on all kind of Windows versions.

On the other hand supporting all these versions is time-intensive from a programmers point of view. You have to test on all these systems. You have to manage special code for different OSes. You have to manage non-Unicode stuff for Win9x and on and on and on...

But does it have a real benefit for users? Are these legacy systems still used by many users?

I tell you a story. A few days ago I tried to install Windows XP to fid out how hard it would be to get my plugin DirSizeCalc Charts up and running. I found out that system updates are really no longer working by default. You can read about some registry hacks on the internet but this was the point for me to say this isn't working for me. Windows XP has died.

From my point of view TC 9 should at least drop support for Win 9x. The more consequent answer would be to even drop support for Windows 2000/XP but this could also be done in TC 9.5 or later when the numbers of XP users has dropped to a minimum.

I don't see any point in keeping support for Win9x since most of the plugins are Unicode or require some API functions that aren't supported by Win9x. So, at least from the plugin point of view, TC is quite limited on these systems.

Dropping support for XP would be too much, IMO, at least for now. As for Win2k, well, that could be discussed because some API functions are missing there, too. Opening RAR archives with the unrar.dll shipped with TC doesn't work, for one.

I'm not sure how much work it really is (for Ghisler) to maintain support for the old systems. My guess is that he limits the tests to a minimum (if any at all).

Regards
Dalai

I voted for no support for 9x versions. This and all older versions of TC will continue to work on those system without any hassle.
Most of the new features that are planned for introducing are either not supported or there is no need of them on such old systems.

With the current compilers and libraries, there is no need to drop support for Windows 9x. I'm already loading newer functions via LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress, so there is no need to remove that.

Windows 3.1 hasn't been supported for many years now, the last 16-bit version is 6.58 from 2008.

2ghisler(Author)
As long as suggestions are not refused with the 'not available on all Windows version' argument I'm okay with that.

thanks