boxford cad cam

[tbutcher]

Hi guys,

 

We are moving to windows 7 at the moment, and are trying to get boxford cad cam working on it so that we can use our milling machines. Now, it turns out that this is pretty impossible! We have spoken with boxford and they say that there is no way to do it, they are working on it but it will be a few months. It crashes at the point when you load an already created file into it, stating a problem with a module in a dll file.

 

Has anybody been able to get this software working successfully on windows 7?? If so, how?!

 

Many Thanks,

Tom

[john]

Sorry to be barer of bad news but its no go I'm afraid. We've got the same problem with it and are desperate for it as DT will have to do something else for the next few months until they get it sorted.

 

A sort of work around is to have your milling machines stand alone on XP still and you can install the existing boxford stuff on Win 7 and do a good chunk of it but you cannot simulate it on 7, so you save at that point and move on to an XP machine.

 

I haven't tried it as an XP on 7 thing yet though that may work but probably not got time to try that this side of September.

 

Just keep pushing for Win 7 to be sorted as tbh its been out long enough and if they knew there market IE schools, they knew we all missed out Vista so the next logical step is Win 7

[tbutcher]

ahh darn it, that was kind of what I expected you to say! they definitely do need to sort it out, its been over a year since the release of Win7 and people were jumping to run it then.

[tbutcher]

for anybody interested: i just had the official word back from boxford. if you are running them over a COM port, the vista version works fine. the reason they haven't released it officially with Win7 compatibility is because the USB driver isn't working properly. fortunately though, ours are pre-USB!

[john]

for anybody interested: i just had the official word back from boxford. if you are running them over a COM port, the vista version works fine. the reason they haven't released it officially with Win7 compatibility is because the USB driver isn't working properly. fortunately though, ours are pre-USB!

 

That's interesting, have you tried running the simulation (I believe that's what it is, not knowing how it works but its the point where it simulates the milling process so you can check it won't get stuck etc) that crashes with random errors that are not good for us or seemingly solvable and my techy told me when he spoke to Boxford that we had the Vista version of the software as well thus wasn't any newer

[tbutcher]

i haven't had a chance to test as of yet, as we are running a version earlier than the Vista one and our order for the new version hasn't gone through yet. i believe the guy said that it was release build 5 that was the one required.

 

the problem you are describing is what we are getting at the moment, however our issue is with an old version. it may be worth you checking whether or not yours is on release build 5, and whether you are runnning it over the COM port or the USB port.

 

i'll let you know the outcome once we get the new version of the software through, fingers crossed!

[john]

i haven't had a chance to test as of yet, as we are running a version earlier than the Vista one and our order for the new version hasn't gone through yet. i believe the guy said that it was release build 5 that was the one required.

 

the problem you are describing is what we are getting at the moment, however our issue is with an old version. it may be worth you checking whether or not yours is on release build 5, and whether you are runnning it over the COM port or the USB port.

 

i'll let you know the outcome once we get the new version of the software through, fingers crossed!

 

They are all COM based, but its not on the actual milling machines its on the kids machines they they write the programs on, the milling machines are standalone XP PCs to ensure they don't fall asleep and allows the DT teachers to play with them as much as they like and they can mess with anything they want to as well.