System Critical Application on Windows 98?

[mheidenreich]

Greetings,

At my company the people way before me decided to write a VC++ program for Windows 98 SE to run an extremely critical and expensive machine. This program is contantly being hit and it crashes all the time. The crashes consist of your normal Windows errors of page faults and fatal exception errors.

The currently machine it is running on is a 450mh PIII IBM 300GL series PC. The original program was the buggiest most poorly written code I have ever seen. And were talking extremely obvious logic errors here. The program was rewritten by some consultant a few months ago fixing a good chunk of the bugs in it.

I've tried swapping identical PC's, switched to ECC ram, patched Visual Studio, and I can't remember what else but its still crashing.

So now I'm leaning towards getting off 98. Since its already written in VC++ I was thinking to drop it into XP and just recompile it. The only problem is as soon as the workspace loads up the project file I get the message "2 Active X controls cannot be instantiated". The version of VStudio is the same thats running on the 98 machine.

I'm a linux programmer and I really don't know much about VC. So if you had to make the choice. Would you.

A. Hire some other consultant to come in and get that program running for XP.

B. Scrap it and use a stable OS like linux. Although I have no idea how to get it to talk to the PLC.

C. Switch out the machine with something not 3 years old and put 98 on it.


Any suggestions would be great.

[Statica]

Depending on budget constraints, I would recommend going with the following order of options:
C .. my first option. The crash might not necessarily be code related; VC++ has been the weapon of choice for a number of such mission critical operations simply because of its advantages. Either way it doesnt hurt to get it running on a new stable machine. Forget the new fangled hardware, get yourself a fast, acceptable stable configuration and go from there
A .. Try to get it running in XP. Of course this might cost money
B .. This option ranks at par with option (a) above, but it would take a bit more of analysis. Yes Linux is a stable OS, but its also not a generic OS, while its great as a server and a NOS, a lot of the libraries that you may need to call upon might not be in stable. The good news is that you can look into it for yourself, from places like freshmeat etc, to see if the base libraries are in ok condition; while there you might try to look into seeing the VC ports to Linux as well. XP is every bit as stable as Linux, it really depends on what you are using it for .. and in this case, I would guess that you would get the same stability from XP/2K. The prohibitive factors being the cost of XP/2K and the whole cycle of upgrades and patches that might run you into some $$.

[mheidenreich]

Is it that hard to convert the original source code from 98 to XP. Or is the operating system so different that a lot of the code will have to be rewritten? I'm just asking in general.

[glc]

If you have a test box available - try running a copy of it on XP, if it doesn't run, try compatibility mode.

[mheidenreich]

No dice. The program really hates compatibility mode. You click on it and it won't even load up. The hour glass blinks and nothin.