The real requirements for Paratext 9.1?

Question

I led a Paratext beginners workshop a couple of weeks ago. Some of the participants weren’t in official translation projects yet, so people brought all sorts of different ages of computers… whatever they could get their hands on. On the Paratext download page it says that Paratext 9.1 requires Windows 8 or greater, and a 64-bit OS. There were several computers where we couldn’t install Paratext 9.1, and one of them was in fact Windows 7, but I think all of the others where the install failed were old versions of Windows 10 (like from 2015 or 2016). I assumed that they must be 32-bit machines, but one of them I specifically checked and it said that it was a 64-bit machine. (I don’t remember the details, but the installs all failed in the same way, so it wasn’t just some random installation failure, but a failure to have the right kind of OS for installation.)

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the computers anymore. I jotted down a couple of notes of Windows 10 versions from a couple of the machines, but I’m not even sure how to decipher my scribbles now: for one “1511 10.0 10240 @2015” and for the other “10.586.0 @2016”.

So the question is, is there a minimum version of Windows 10 required, or is there some dot net library or something required that old Windows 10 versions don’t have?

Fortunately, I believe we were able to install Paratext 9.0 on all of those machines, but that also caused some confusion for these beginners, when things on their screen weren’t the same as on the presenter’s screen.

Answer 1

Yup, these seem to be from July 2015 (build 10240) and Nov 2015 (build 10586). I found build numbers, release dates, etc here Windows 10 version history - Wikipedia.

In a way, it’s too bad that Windows 10 hasn’t made it more clear which version of Windows 10 you’re running. It makes it all seem like the same version (which I think makes the user feel more comfortable and not like they’re constantly having to upgrade), but I’ve had no real concept of how long Windows 10 has been around. Isn’t it all just Windows 10?!

It also appears they build the year into the first 2 digits of the version number: e.g., 1507 was from 2015, 1607 was from 2016, and now 20H2 was released in 2020. But the build number (which doesn’t carry a lot of meaning for end users like me) seems to be what is generally seen.

This is helpful information to know, thank you @jeffh.

Answer 2

Thanks for reporting this, jeffh. This needs further investigation because it may explain why many users seem to be stuck on 9.0, even though the upgrade to 9.1 is supposed to be automatic.

Answer 3

The limiting factor is which versions of Windows 64-bit support .Net 4.8, we don’t have a 32-bit installer.

I found this page from Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/get-started/system-requirements

It says that Windows 10 1607 or later, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1 can all have .Net 4.8 installed on them.

John+Wickberg

Answer 4

Can those old Windows 10 versions be updated to later Windows 10 versions? Are there any limitations that would prevent say that 10240 machine to upgrade to Windows 10 1607, or something more recent like Windows 10 2004?

Comments

I did some searching and found this page:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/software-download/windows10

It looks like it will offer to upgrade to the latest version of Windows 10, but I’m not sure which versions it allows as a starting point.

I also found this page:
https://www.yourwindowsguide.com/2017/10/upgrade-to-windows-10-fall-creators-html.html

This is about 3 years old, so I’m not sure if the example it gives still works.

I think the main problem you’ll face is the size of the download that would be required.

John+Wickberg