STRATAGem and Win10

[Probeman]

This morning I tried to launch STRATAGem on our thin film reprocessing computer and I got the following error:



The thing is that we updated this computer to Win10 a few months ago and had not tried STRATAGem since then.  Unfortunately it appears that our 2017 version of STRATAGem is not compatible with Win 10.

I tried running it in Win 7 and Win 8 compatibility mode, even setting it to run "as admin". I still get the error about the missing stratadll.dll file (though the dll file is in the folder with the executable!).

I tried re-running the STRATAGem installer, but it also gives me an error:



I guess I could find another Win 7 PC to install it on, but does anyone have any other suggestions?

[BenjaminWade]

Hi John
Long shot but I would copy the dll file into the SysWOW64 folder. It should be in there not in the executable folder I think. Unless you are running 32bit in which case copy it into the normal System32 folder.

cheers

[Probeman]

Hi John
Long shot but I would copy the dll file into the SysWOW64 folder. It should be in there not in the executable folder I think. Unless you are running 32bit in which case copy it into the normal System32 folder.

cheers

Hi Ben,
If only it were that simple!  Yeah, I tried just in case but we get the same "missing dll" error.  Technically, if the dll is in the app folder it should work just fine.  The only reason for having a dll in the Windows SysWOW64 or System32 folders is when you have multiple apps from different folders that need to access that dll.

We had to deal with this with the Remote and Matrix shared Active-X communications. We ended up using Microsoft's "Common Files" folder mechanism, as described here:

https://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=1062.msg7104#msg7104

I just got a response from Marc at SAMx and he confirms that we need to update STRATAGem for Win10. He said "because some Microsoft components have changed".  I just hope it's not too expensive!  We don't do that much thin film work anymore.

john

[JonF]

If its only used infrequently, you could always set up a Windows 7 virtual machine using something like VirtualBox?

Or WINE if you're on OS X or Linux?

Saves having a dedicated Windows 7 PC sat around.

[Probeman]

If its only used infrequently, you could always set up a Windows 7 virtual machine using something like VirtualBox?

Or WINE if you're on OS X or Linux?

Saves having a dedicated Windows 7 PC sat around.

Hi Jon,
I used to use Windows virtual machines in the past for software testing on a "virgin" OS, so I can hope that it's easier than it used to be!

But we have a fine PC for re-processing, so we went ahead and bought the Win 10 upgrade from SAMX ($1400) and now we are back in business.

But I (as I'm sure are many), am interested in an alternative to STRATAGem, and that might be the new BadgerFilm by Aurelien Moy. I recently got a beta version to try out so as soon as I get a little time I'll compare it to some STRATAGem calculations. 

One nice feature I am looking forward to is that Aurelien recently modified BadgerFilm to handle multiple thin film data sets so we can get statistics.