A rather long anecdote about upgrading

[Björnke von Gierke]

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over the sudden 
incapability of Rev to run on 10.2 versions of Mac OS X. Of course 
there where some who would say "Just buy an upgrade, it's only <insert 
dollar amount they seem to have in their pockets as change>". That 
reminded me of a task I am still going trough now.


I play the computer expert for a non profit organisation from time to 
time. They're quite small, and do not have a big budget. One of their 
most important services is a phone line that is run by an interactive 
voice menu (press 1 for x, press 2 for y, etc.). It is run when no one 
is at the office, which is most of the time. This service to the 
general public is run by a Windows 98 machine with a voice modem 
attached, and some off the shelf software.

The same Computer also host their donator and tax databases, and is 
also used as general internet entry point. They had problems with the 
antivirus (Norton) software auto upgrade, so Symantec told them to 
upgrade to the newest version to get it to work. However, due to the 
upgrade, the phone software started to have random lock ups (in 
addition to Norton AV still not updating automatically).

Of note here is that the machine had 32 MB or RAM at that time. So we 
asked everyone and their dog if they still had PC-100 RAM modules 
laying around. Meanwhile we bought a second computer, for people to 
work on (which they didn't, because the old one was always running, 
while the new one had to be started and shut down, and the databases 
where still on the old one).

After some months, we finally found someone who had spare PC-100's, and 
upgraded the RAM of the old machine to a whooping 128 MB. which of 
course didn't solve anything at all. Because of that, they decided to 
finally get a new machine as replacement.

Now we found out that the phone software does not run on anything newer 
then Windows 98 (maybe Windows ME, but we didn't really want to go down 
that route). Therefore we attach the voice modem to the already 
installed second PC which had Windows XP installed, and tried some 
software.

Unfortunately most software was unusable, either failing to see the 
modem at all, or failing to do anything with it. One of the products I 
tested gave a hint about the voice modem not having the needed windows 
telephone api version, but only an older one (said software was a UI 
nightmare, and crashed all the time, even when only choosing menus, but 
at least it told us what's wrong with our hardware, instead of silently 
ignoring it's existence).

So we went shopping for a new telephone hardware. But voice modem are 
not recommended, so we got an internal telephone PCI card, a voice 
board. Sadly, only marginally more software ran on the voice board then 
on the voice modem, and we got quite desperate, so we started to mail 
the developers of these softwares, to get anything working at all.

Maybe I should also mention that many developers didn't have a test 
version on their site, instead offering to build a interactive voice 
menu to our specification, without showing a price on the site at all.  
I mostly ignored those. On the other hand, all software I was able to 
test looked as if it was designed for Windows 95. Fortunately we 
finally found two products we actually would use, and decided on one of 
them.
Next week we will take phone line handling away from the old computer, 
and make a trial phase with the new software.

All in all this showed us a very simple thing:
Just to get rid of an anti virus software not updating automatically, 
we had to buy lots of stuff, and invest three quarters of a year. 
Updating vintage systems, even if it's to get a bug fixed, is most 
probably a costly endeavour, not to talk of all the now greyed and torn 
out hairs.

i hope you had fun reading this
Bjoernke


PS: And next we'll replace the databases, to finally get rid of Windows 
98.

-- 

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