what's the advatanges to upgrade to 2011?

[dragondriver]

Hi all,

  My lab have 10 machines running labview7. All the programs were well designed and having been running for  years. But recently, we are going to purchase new machines and we are thinking if we should use windows 7 or not. Also, for the labview, it seems that version 7 doesn't work on win7 x64 and porting all the old programs from 7 to 2011 is pretty painful. I just wonder what's the most advantage to upgrade from 7 to 2011? Will the program run faster or what? The main problem in the old system we are running now is the program is so vast and when we run the system, the input/output signal is handled with lag more or less. I don't know if 2011 will solve that problem or not. Thanks.

[crossrulz]

You should also be careful about your drivers.  If your system was built with Traditional DAQ, that won't work with Windows 7.  It is still technically supported in LabVIEW 2011.

There were a lot of improvements since LV7.  I'm not sure about the compiled code running better.  Upgrading machines will do that for you anyways.

My advice is to upgrade 1 machine, find all of the kinks, fix them, then upgrade the rest.

[mikeporter]

Big ditto to what crossrulz said. Is there a reason you aren't upgrading to 2012. In my experience 2012 is by far more stable thatn 2011.

Mike...

[dragondriver]

Oh, I just not realize that 2012 was released. Anyway, I am still worry if there will be too much work to do for porting from the old one to the new version since I have heard that the old and new version are not compatible. If there is really worth of upgrading, I don't mind to transferr everything to the new platform tough it might take me couple weeks to go (since the system is really big).

[Dennis_Knutson]

The upgrade of LabVIEW itself should be pretty easy. As mentioned, the biggest problem would be if you used the traditional DAQ functions instead of DAQmx that was introduced with 7.0. You have not provided any details on the hardware you are using so it is hard to say exactly what issues you might face.

[Matthew_Kelton]

Also, what cards do you have.  Support for some older DAQ cards has been removed, so you need to make sure you new software will work with the cards in general.

[dragondriver]

The system was designed long time ago by someone else, I just take over. I think it is using traditional DAQ not DAQmx. And we are using few different cards, the major one are 6711 and 6713

[REDS]

Hello dragondriver,

I would recommend you to upgrade to DAQmx since National Instruments currently do not officially support Traditional NI DAQ (T-DAQ) as it is outdated. Please read through the Transition from Traditional NI-DAQ to NI-DAQmx in LabVIEW so you get a better understanding on the differences and how does the new DAQmx VI’s look like compared to the old T-DAQ versions.

According to the NI-DAQmx and NI-DAQ Driver Support: PCI/PXI Devices, you can see that your 6711 and 6713 are both supported under DAQmx, so you should be fine to migrate.

According to the Upgrade or Revert VI table, you should be able to go from LabVIEW 7 all the way to 2012. If you have broken arrows after the upgrade, I would advise you to have them upgrade in an intermediate version, like 8.6, and then upgrade it to 2012.