Compatibility

[Kevin McShannon]

Hi. Advice would be appreciated: I have VW2012 running on an aprox 2012 PC and printing to an HP Designjet 510. I want to upgrade to latest VW (2018) and would love to get an Imac or Mac Pro. So far I have discovered (at a Mac shop) that VW 2012 will not run on the 2017 Imac (Sierra OS) and the printer driver also would not work on it.Its a fine printer, 4 years old. And having a machine that supports both the old and the new VW versions would help a lot with migrating all the projects to the current version. What to do? Get VW 2018 and the Sierra Imac, but also have to buy a new printer? All very expensive. Or find a recent mac with older OS that supports the printer and VW 2012 and VW 2018? Or give up on macs and find a pc that is more forgiving? 

[mike m oz]

You could also publish to PDF and then use your older Mac to print the PDF using the old printer.

[Kevin McShannon]

The issue is when dealing with volumes of work and time constraints, that just adds a layer of complexity and time. From experience nothing beats being able to do everything from one machine. Is it possible to buy the latest mac, with its Sierra OS, but then somehow put in an earlier OS?

[Pat Stanford]

Jumping 6 versions is always going to be painful.

 

Best solution I can think of would be to create a virtual machine (Virtual Box, Parallels, VMWare) running an older OS with VW2012. Then you can share the hard drive to move files back and forth.

ete

Depending on the version of Mac OS, it is technically against the license agreement to run MacOS under virtualization, but since you. will still be running it on Apple hardware, there is some wiggle room.

 

You will need to do a google search about the best way to set it up for what you want. A long time ago I created a VM rurnning one of the Server versions of the OS (maybe 10.6?) as that was the one that had virtualization OK in the license agreement.

 

 

[Urbanist]

10 hours ago, Kevin McShannon said:

 the printer driver also would not work on it.

 

What, no driver for the current OS X? That's really bad customer support, but then again, it is HP. 

[Kevin McShannon]

thanks for alerting me to this; the HP shop checked and said there is a driver update for the Designjet 510 printer which is compatible with Mac OS 10.12 - will try to download it and put it on a disk and take that to the Mac shop........

[Matt Overton]

We run our 10 year old HP DesignJet on the new drivers on 10.12 works well. 

 

[zoomer]

I also thought the printer should not really be a problem.

 

And I expect that VW 2018 will reasonably open all VW 2012 projects without greater loss.

Migrating may not be a large problem either and I see no reason for a need to keep running

VW 2012 - File wise.

The problem is the new Tools and Workflows of 6 releases newer VW version, if you can (want)

deal with that in general. Even start completely new projects in an App you aren't used to.

VW 2018 should still allow to work in legacy workflows though.

 

If you are willing to do so I think it is far better to use current hardware, software and workflows

in the long run.

 

There may be reasons why someone wants to keep older Versions of VW running.

If that is important, either

- keep old Software+OS+Hardware

(replace via eBay or repair if needed)

- try to run old OS in a virtual Machine on new Hardware

(OS X ?)

or better

- stay with Windows in that case