win32file.pyd Device Error on W95

[Tim Peters]

[Marie-Claude Savoie, lamenting Win95 woes]
> For many people around the world, people don't have the latest
> and greatest hardware.  There is also another set of people who have
> junk 486 computers that would like to put them to good use as
> instrument test machines, controllers or the like.
>
> If someone told you that you should toss out your car after it was
> only 7 years old because the gas would no longer work in it, what would
> you say?

I'd be unhappy.  However, if you buy a Microsoft product, you have to
realize that Microsoft will eventually stop supporting it, and because the
source code is secret nobody else will be able to support it either.  At
that point you need to buy a new version of their product, or give up hope
of trying to use it with other new things that come along.  Win95 is at that
point -- it's an official Dead End.

> Upgrading is not a reasonable reply.

Tell that to Microsoft -- it was their decision to stop updating Win95, and
Win95 systems will become increasingly lame as a result.

If you have junk 486 computers sitting around that you'd like to use as test
machines or controllers (etc), then (for example) Linux should work fine on
them, it's free, and is a better OS for high-uptime applications anyway.

> Unfortunately, as far as a patch goes, I neither have the Microsoft
> compiler, nor the C experience.

Nor any support from Microsoft for recent additions to the Win32 API.  You
can continue using Win95 with the apps you already have, but, more and more,
new apps simply won't work with it, and old Win95 apps will lose whatever
support they still have.

For the sake of Python's low-end Windows users (and for my sisters <wink>),
I stay far behind the MS OS curve, but even I had to switch to Win98 a year
ago -- Win95 had become unbearable.  PythonLabs no longer has access to a
Win95 box for testing, so if a Win95-specific problem crops up, Win95 users
are going to have to solve it.  Life on Win98 is becoming hard too (e.g.,
VC7 doesn't run on Win98), and I expect that a year from now PythonLabs
won't have any Win9x boxes.