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Pegasus Mail, Mercury and Windows 7

In October 2009, Microsoft introduced their latest release of Windows, Windows 7. Unlike the release of Windows Vista, which was a fiasco, the release of Windows 7 was relatively smooth. On this page, we detail issues we are aware of that might affect Pegasus Mail and Mercury users who wish to move to Windows 7.

Pegasus Mail v4.52, introduced in January 2010, has no known issues under Windows 7 and runs well on all versions we have been able to test, including Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Earlier versions of Pegasus Mail: As with Windows Vista, Windows 7 does not include the WinHelp help system, so users of Pegasus Mail versions earlier than 4.51 will not be able to access the program's online help without downloading WinHelp from Microsoft's site. Pegasus Mail v4.51 has its own help system, so is unaffected by this problem. I have been advised by some of my beta testers that there is a problem in all versions of Pegasus Mail earlier than v4.52 where in certain circumstances, the program's toolbar buttons may either not display correctly, or may not display at all under Windows 7. Aside from these issues, we are not aware of any problems using versions of Pegasus Mail earlier than v4.52 under Windows 7, although some of the test team who use NetWare have reported that the Novell requester software for Windows 7 may not be entirely stable at this point.

Mercury/32:  As noted above, Windows 7 does not include the WinHelp help system required by Mercury/32. This can be fixed in the short term by downloading WinHelp from Microsoft: we hope to have the Pegasus Mail help system retrofitted to Mercury in the near future to deal with this issue. You should note that if you run Mercury as a service (new in Mercury/32 v4.72) the program can no longer interact with the desktop when you use Windows 7 (this was also true of Windows Vista and is true of Windows Server 2008). The program can still interact with the desktop when run as an application, and can run as a service without interacting with the desktop. Aside from these issues, we are not currently aware of other problems running Mercury under Windows 7, but our Windows 7 development system is close at hand, and development and testing are continuing.

David Harris,
January 23rd 2010.

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[ Page modified 23 January 2010 | Content © David Harris ]