Moving Delphi 4 from an older PC to a new one

[tom62]

Hi,

Once upon a time I had an old Pentium 133 on which I installed Delphi 4. This was a registered copy of my old employer.

Now that I have a new "very fast" PC and changed jobs, I have the problem that I can't install my old Delphi 4 on my new PC (since my old employer kept the original CD's).

My first question is: would it somehow be possible to move Delphi 4 from my old to my new PC. If not then my second question is: how does Delphi 7 (Personal Edition) compares with Delphi 4 (Professional Edition).

Final question: On the Borland website is stated that the Delphi 7 Personal edition is intended for writing non-commercial applications. What does that exactly mean? Will it show a nag-screen or something else nasty, when I install my home-brewed applications on other PC's?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Tom.

 

[towerbase]

If the Delphi 4 is licensed to your old employer then you are not allowed to install it on your own computer.

Delphi 7 Personal edition is intended as a tool to learn about Delphi programming. It is not intended for developing applications for use on other PCs.

I recommend that you purchase Delphi 7 Professional edition. It is a superb product and very good value considering what it does.

I don't think anyone on this forum would condone any form of software theft, especially against Borland, if that is what you were considering.

 

[tom62]

Thanks for your reply,

I had no intention of installing an illegal copy of Delphi on my PC. My idea was to reinstall the older Delphi 4 on my new PC and then obtain an official license for it from Borland. I do have an offical licensed copy of Delphi 2, but that version I cannot upgrade to Delphi 7 Professional.
I admit that Delphi 7 has some wonderful new features, but for what I intend to do with it, it doesn't seem to justify the high purchasing costs.

 

[sggaunt]

Hello Tom62
I dont think it does justify the price, you can get freeware componenets that ill let you do a lot of things that you get with newer versions of Delphi .e.g internet connectivity, Maths libarays, Fancy buttons. Etc. I myself am sticking with a copy of D4 as that was the last version (with comercial licence) that you could purchase for a resonable amount. D7 Pro will cost you an arm and a leg.
I can forsee one problem not just for you and me, but for all small developers, and that is the '.net' thing if Microsoft bring out an OS that only runs D8 and above produced code. Then a lot of us will be 'In the dirty water without a paddle' so to speak.
Anyone else like to comment on this ?

Steve.

 

[towerbase]

Delphi Pro 7 is not expensive in comparison to other leading edge software products of similar complexity and quality.

For some applications Delphi 7 would be overkill and individual circumstances would dictate whether it is good value for any particular project.

I am a hobbyist programmer. I skipped Delphi 4 Pro and Delphi 6 Pro. So the cost of having the best RAD tool in the world for me works out at about UKP100 per annum. As hobbies go that is not expensive.

I think it highly unlikely that Microsoft would bring out an OS that would only run .net applications. They may be greedy but they are not stupid. I can still run DOS applications on Windows XP and I imagine that any future Microsoft OS would support the users current investment in their applications otherwise who would buy it?

Andrew

 

[sggaunt]

Andre what did you pay for D7? Isnt it IRO £850 in the UK.
'Er indoors' was a bit hard to convince that I should pay
£45 for D4 a couple of years back.

and dont forget that Microsoft have a virtual Monopoly, they can and have in the past done exactly what they want.

Steve..

 

[tom62]

I agree with you all. As a hobby-programmer, who is only interested in a small subset of the functions provided by Delphi 7, I'm not interested in spending a huge amount for what I will barely use.

For my "normal" Internet programming and most home-brewed tools I use Borland's JBuilder 5 Professional (although I'm thinking about switching over to the Eclipse platform). Here in Germany I would pay for Delphi-7 Professional approx. 1000 Euro. That is a lot of money for someone like me, who has to support a family.

What I intend to do now is to find an older licensed version of JBuilder on Ebay. In .NET support I'm not interested, so JBuilder 4 or 5 would do the trick.

Tom

 

[towerbase]

I purchased the original D1 many years ago. Since then I have purchased upgrades - the last one being D7 Pro in Sep 2002 which cost me UKP 277.94 (from Borland). The previous upgrade, D5 Pro, I purchased was in Sep 1999 and cost me a fraction over UKP300. The one prior to that was D3 Pro. Hence my approximation of UKP 100.00 per annum.

I agree that 1000 Euros is a lot if you are not going to use most of the facilities. Why not stick to JBuilder?

It obviously depends on personal circumstances but many people spend well over 1000 Euros each year on their hobbies (such as golf, ski-ing, motorsport, photography, mobile phones, narcotics ....).

I would quite like to get into Java but I'm not prepared to pay that kind of money either for JBuilder 8(?).

Maybe Borland needs to have a version of Delphi Pro which generates executables that will only run in the presence of the IDE and charge say 200 Euros. But this might not meet Tom's requirements.

Andrew

 

[tom62]

Hi Andrew,

If you'd like to get into JAVA, I can truly recommend the Eclipse Platform which you can obtain for free at

http://www.eclipse.org

Personally I like it even better than JBuilder, but that is maybe just a matter of taste.

Anyway, what I don't like so much about JAVA (compared to Delphi) is that it is rather awkward to create GUI's, that it is slower and that it requires a JAVA run-time to run the programs on other machines.

Tom

 

[michaenh]

Hi.

I agree with you there Tom. I like Delphi better as it is a great RAD application development tool. And you can do almost everything with Delphi.

One thing I really like with java is the portality. You code once and it should work in different OS, and with applet it could run on web or on your local computer.

There is a compilator,Netbeans, which is created by The Sun is free and I think it is really ok.

mha