Please advise what to do to download the free upgrade to Legeasy6 so that my DE6.52 will work on my new PC

Hi.
LegEasy 6 Windows is not a free upgrade from 6.x.

The last release version of 6.x is more than 10 years old and DataEase has moved on to 7.x, 8.x and DG3 since then.

We are a new team that took over DataEase development 2 years ago and we realised quickly that a lot of users had never moved to 7.x due to poor quality and a lot of functionality changes that made it a poor candidate for migration from earlier versions of DFW.

When we started to get a lot of support requests on how to install 6.x on Windows 7 we revised the previous recommendation - Upgrade to 7.x - and decided to re-develop 6.x so it would continue to run in Windows 7/8 etc.

We are a business and we can't dedicate resources and time to develop software without getting paid for it. The upgrade from previous versions of DFW to LegEasy 6.x is a reasonable £149 for a single user, and £99 pr. user when you upgrade 5 or more.

I had this issue in Win7 and a workaround that works was found.  I noted it down and works great for me in Win7.

How to get DE652 working in Windows 7 (this may work in 8)

- Install DE652 as normal (for 64 bit install to the program files (x86) folder) .
- Rename to .local: C:\program files (x86)\DE652 to C:\program files (x86)\DE652.local
- Go in the .local folder and copy dataease.exe to dataease.exe.local
- Set environment variables up as normal
- Point shortcut to original \Dataease.exe file and run as administrator

This was a work around that was "recommended" when Windows 7x first came out, and it works OK in Windows 7 x86 (32 bit), but you get quickly into trouble if you run x64 and this is why we developed Leg6.

DataEase 6.x is based around optimistic memory management and use fixed buffers sizes to make it more efficient and faster. This was important back in the day as dynamic management was deemed to fast. Because memory came at a premium too, the buffers was a small as deemed safe at the time too.

This was fine as long as the software are run in the environment it was designed for x32, but everything come at a price. In x64 you move data around in 64 bit chunks so storing the same stuff in memory will take twice the space and hence a lot of buffers are too small.

A GPF is basically what you get when you write outside your allocated memory area and that is what you get when you overrun a buffer.

We have spent quite a lot of resources on trying to find good workarounds for running legacy DataEase versions in Windows 7.x etc but mostly we have had to admit defeat. Yes, you can get it to run with certain limitations, but getting it to run is not the same as getting it to run in a sensible or effective way.

We didn't make LegEasy 6 on a whim, we just realised that we needed to make a version to keep our legacy users running until we could offer them a more sensible way forward than migrating to 7. So far we have done several 100 fixes to memory management and other compatibility issues in WIndows 7/8 and we will keep on fixing to make it running.