Cumulus Support

I treated myself to a new laptop at Xmas and of course it came with Win8 and IE10. I spent a couple of days making it look as much like Win7 as I could as I didn't like the "Metro" interface. So far, so good. Cumulus has worked faultlessly and I've just updated to Cumulus 1.9.3. build 1059.

I have some issues with IE10 though and they seem to stem from websites using JavaScript buttons. They just don't work. Solution is to press F12 and choose a previous version of IE. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't I've still got my old laptop as a fallback.

FWIW I do think that Windows 8 (and successors such as Window Blue, whether that effectively is just a Win8 service pack or Win8.5 or Win9, and rumoured to be released as soon as this summer) will start to be widely used in the medium term. Reasons I'd cite, eg:

1. People are buying new/replacement PCs all the time and soon it may become difficult to find a mainstream PC that doesn't have Win8 installed.

2. Increasingly, other MS software (just encountered this myself with Visual Studio 2012) will require at least Win7. That's fine if you've already got Win7, but if not and eg you currently have XP or Vista then it could be a hard call not to jump straight to Win8.

3. Another factor for me was being attracted by the idea of using Windows on all devices (ie phone, tablet and PC). The Nokia Lumia 620 phone has just been released and seems to be reviewing well as a good but affordable WinPho8 phone. Win8 tablets are starting to become widespread too. I can see quite a few advantages to using a single OS throughout.

4.I suspect that more and more users will realise that updating to Win8 isn't actually a big deal. There are quite a few things to like about it and perhaps just a couple of issues that aren't resolved yet (the Start screen doesn't allow nested folders at present, which is a definite nuisance but not a showstopper and could probably be fixed fairly easily; and I really miss not having a Recent Documents list).

I am using windows 8 and have not had any issues with Cumulus except for one...

I have multiple monitors with an independent taskbar on each monitor that only shows the apps currently on each partcular monitor. In windows 7 I accomplished this with a 3rd party app (ultramon), however in windows 8 there is native support for multiple monitor taskbars.

The problem I have with Cumulus, is that regardless of the monitor I place Cumulus on, the program resides only on the main monitors taskbar (also in the tray if minimized)

I would really prefer it to only be in the tray all the time and not show on any of the taskbars, but if it is going to show, I obviously want it on the monitor in which the program resides.

Could we maybe see an option send Cumulus to the tray all the time (no taskbar presence) kind of like in winamp? If not, having the taskbar presence move to the correct monitor where the program is in focus would be ideal...

Thanks,

Trey

It's unlikely that I'll be able to do anything about that, sorry. It's all handled by a third-party component which is no longer being maintained.

Although I totally agree that Windows 8 is a retrograde step from Windows 7 for a desktop PC, I am running Windows 8 on my main desktop as I have a strange issue where Windows 7 keeps producing roaming profiles (this doesn't happen with any other PC in the house). I have installed a few apps to ensure it boots straight to the desktop and to restore the windows start menu which at least has made it usable. Anyone purchasing a new PC will also be forced down the Windows 8 route so it looks like Windows 8 support will eventually be a must. The good news is although I have only been using Cumulus for a few days it appears to run on Windows 8 without an issue.

Neil

Windows 8 is OK if you don't have Windows 7 anymore, but do yourself a favour and install classicshell.
This returns the start button and all the other stuff MS stripped out of it.

Now running Windows 8.1 preview on dev system, installed cumulus with no issues. 8 and 8.1 are SIGNIFICANTLY better than 7 in terms of startup speed, search speed and general operating speed. They have a smaller footprint and seem to run quicker overall as well as being customisable for users.

Don't believe everything you read!

8 and 8.1 are SIGNIFICANTLY better than 7 in terms of startup speed, search speed and general operating speed.

Run 8 or 8.1 on a Solid State Drive and you'll be laughing!

gwheelo

gwheelo wrote:
Run 8 or 8.1 on a Solid State Drive and you'll be laughing!

gwheelo

Sub 5 second boots

With windows 8 PRO with Media Center I have problems with Cumulus.It does not installed correctly..I will try to create a topic to find an answer and a solution to this..

Cliff wrote:I'm undecided as well. I've used Win8 on my laptop and it takes a little getting used to over Windows7. That being said, my main PC that has Cumulus on it will "probably" not be upgraded to Win8. Like the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". And we all know that Microsoft fixes some bugs in new releases and introduces new ones. Why create a "perfect" product, your revenue stream would eventually dry up! Hell, they've been doing that since the first version in 1985

Cliff,
We are practically neighbours!!! I'm in TH also... http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstat ... =IONCAMPB2

Check it out!.


I'm running cumulus 1.92 and 1.94 on windows 7 and windows 8 without incident. All seems normal from an operational perspective. However, I do have an unrelated problem, and this began several months ago. It occurs on both operating systems, and is DATE related..

Whenever cumulus starts it complains via the blinking 'error' indicator that there is an 'invalid integer value'. Upon closer investigation of the dayfile.txt and mmmyyLOG.txt files, I notice that the date field is incorrect. Cumulus is writing these files as:

25-10-13,15:17,1.8,90,0.3,2.3,3.6,231,0.0,0.0,1007.7,10070.0,22.0,40,2.5,1.8,1.8,0.0,0,0.00,0.00,-0.6,345,0.0,270
25 10 13,15:21,6.5,91,5.1,3.2,7.2,230,0.0,0.0,999.9,10070.0,21.3,49,7.2,6.5,6.5,0.0,0,0.00,0.00,4.8,335,0.0,225

Note the date in the first entry is hyphenated: 25-10-13. Whereas the date in the second entry not. I must, at random or regular intervals, manually edit the files to change the blanks to hyphens. How does cumulus get the date from windows(7 or 8) and why is it being so consistently incorrect? Is this a bug?

Any help appreciated.

Chris
aka cc_rider

It uses the date separator as configured in Windows. I think it's unlikely to be a bug in Cumulus itself, it doesn't even know what the separator is, it just tells the runtime to use "/" and it turns out that means "use the separator configured in Windows". I've only ever seen this problem when someone actually has their separator set to space, so it is consistently written as a space in the files. Was there even a restart of Cumulus between those two entries you've quoted?

It seems very odd indeed that you should have this same problem on two separate machines running different versions of Windows and different versions of Cumulus, and no-one else apparently has the problem at all.

I can only suggest that you try resetting the date separator in Windows. Unless you specifically need it to be a hyphen, you could try setting it to a slash.

I recently installed windows 8.1 and am very happy with it. I also run Cumulus on this system. Although I have found a way around it, is it possible to include in the configuration 'Run at Windows Start' - unless I have overlooked this facility somewhere.

Thanks, Steve, for all your hard work - much appreciated.

Albert Dulfer wrote:is it possible to include in the configuration 'Run at Windows Start'

Do you mean in Cumulus? I leave it to users to decide on the best method for themselves, depending on which version of Windows they use. If there was an option in Cumulus, all it would do would be to use one of the existing methods that Windows provides, and Microsoft have a habit of changing things.

Not for at least a year, likely 3 years out.