www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

I am sorry that you've decided to move away from VirtualRPC, it's a shame. I suspect that future updates to Vista, or more correctly the drivers for the graphics adapter, will resolve your one remaining issue.

With regard to the A9 Home, the reported disc corrution problems seem to be related (from what I've read and been told) to MessengerPro. Quitting this from the iconbar before shutting down the machine seems to resolve the problem.

I hope you get on better with the Iyonix, although I suggest keeping a spare power supply handy as the Iyonix machines tend to get through them at quite a rate.

I think it is a bit of a shame too, the aim was all computing on the one machine and VRPC does integrate well with its host. If a fix does appear then that will change things.



It was a long time ago but I do not think MPro was in use on the A9home at the time. The A9home needs it finished, bug free that is, OS before it gets considered again here.



It would have been nice if the A9home could have been used as replacement for the elderly Iyonix.

To be honest I no longer use RISC OS as much as I did in the past.

I don't think it's a silly statement.

It is an inditement of an, in many ways excellent, piece of software that it requires its users to configure their systems in one, specific, VA-dictated way. Personally, I had a choice about upgrading to Vista and I did so in full knowledge of this weakness of VRPC so I'm not complaining, directly . However, I can imagine plenty of cases where the decision won't be in people's hands (e.g. it's pretty hard already to buy a new PC without Vista).


Is there a reason why VRPC can't behave like other Windows apps and store the user-editable bits of its configuration in the Users/<username>/AppData structure?

[snip]


This seems like a sensible default setup, in any case. HardDisc4 is going to contain lots of end-user documents (and no Windows executables!) and therefore fits more comfortably into the "documents" structure than the "programs" structure.


This is excellent news I sincerely hope mouse scrolling and pointer-synchronisation are going to be re-instated


Thanks, that's appreciated.

Cheers,
Adam

The problem with User Account Control is that it doesn't work properly. If it did then it would actually provide a very useful system. Each user logging onto Vista would not only "see" their customised Vista settings, but also their customised RISC OS ones.

As I explained earlier the issue is that with UAC enabled Windows read from "Program Files", but writes to the "Virtual Store". This is ridiculous. If it did both, i.e. Read and Write, to the users specific copies of the files in the VirtualStore it would be a very useful feature. As it stands it needs to be disabled because it doesn't work properly. That's not the fault of VirtualAcorn.

FWIW I've had the same error on my laptop (but haven't gone through checking everything yet, so it might not be worth me saying anything). It's only happened (so far) on a mode change, and only when I've had the laptop connected to an external monitor.

With regard to the "Hibernate" problem on this thread - a possible solution has been found by mohlson:

Untick the screen saver's:

"On resume, display logon screen"

option button. With this change VRPC should now recover from a hibernate.

Unfortunately this workaround is not relevant here. The "Unable to create primary surface" error occurs here depressingly regularly at various times, when switching round between RISC OS and Windows (e.g. the screensaver is not active), though it doesn't happen always and I've been unable to identify much of a pattern.

In fact this problem has become really frustrating as I can't feel safe about switching to and from Windows. Even if I save all my work before the switch (which is irritating by itself) I still have to reorganise my desktop with all my open windows and documents when I recover from the crash

Adam