Question EnRoute 4

[KSTrooper]

What's up all, looks like I'm back in the sign business. Stepped in for a friend that was injured in an accident and I'm back at the first shop I spent 17 years at. Anyway, the boss asked me to look into some upgrades for some of our PCs and the machine running our CNC router (Multicam 3000 series) is still running Windows XP! (yikes)

It's currently running EnRoute 4, and it's working fine but the computer is definitely getting tired. I've already looked at the upgrade prices for EnRoute and as cheap as they are we will probably end up getting the new version. However, just in case anyone knows, is EnRoute 4 compatible with Windows 10? I did a little cursory research this morning and didn't find much info.

Thanks in advance!

 

[WildWestDesigns]

If I'm not mistaken Enroute 4 official OS support ends with Vista.

While due to the bloat of legacy code blobs in Windows it may very well be possible to run the older program, due to the rolling release nature of Win 10, any update could at any time kill that functionality. Since it appears that the odds are good of updating not only the OS, but the software as well, I wouldn't even bother with trying to maintain the legacy program. For me, if I was going to attempt to maintain the legacy program, I would actually see about getting a rig that I could VM any of the supported OSs and run that program within a VM. It would be a little bit of a pickle with getting it to hook up with the Multicam, but should still be doable, but still not a sure thing, just like it wouldn't be a sure thing with stability of using Enroute 4 on Win 10).

 

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

I keep a Win 7 PC, permanently offline, and run ER4 from that.
It suits me to do it that way.

 

[MikePro]

if not, pretty sure you can still run in compatibility mode. right click program > properties > compatibility > as far back as windows xp.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

I keep a Win 7 PC, permanently offline, and run ER4 from that.
It suits me to do it that way.

I wish more people would do that even with current OSs that run production machines, but I digress.

 

[astro8]

Enroute will run fine on Win10, 32 or 64, it's the dongle drivers that are the problem. From memory, up to version 4.3 will run on Win7. They changed the dongle and drivers from version 4.4 and I think it will run on Win10 32 and maybe 64. This is off memory, so not 100% positive.
You'll not gain much from version 4 to present unless you're into a lot of 3D texturing and stuff.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Enroute will run fine on Win10, 32 or 64, it's the dongle drivers that are the problem. From memory, up to version 4.3 will run on Win7. They changed the dongle and drivers from version 4.4 and I think it will run on Win10 32 and maybe 64. This is off memory, so not 100% positive.
You'll not gain much from version 4 to present unless you're into a lot of 3D texturing and stuff.

Didn't MS stop distributing 32bit versions of the OS to OEMs? I think the OP would have to go to the used market to find a totally 32bit system.

 

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

I can run ER4 on a 64-bit Win7pro

 

[KSTrooper]

Thanks everyone for the replies. Sorry for the late response, my old email was compromised and it took me forever to get everything associated with it changed over. I'm probably still missing a few things.

 

[ikarasu]

I wish more people would do that even with current OSs that run production machines, but I digress.

Normally I think you're being crazy and that's being too safe.. Then an idiot in the office got a ransomware virus that infected all the servers... And my production PC... And guess which was the only PC that wasn't completely backed up...

Rematching all my custom colors made me ensure a proper backup was in place while also ripping out my hair...

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Normally I think you're being crazy and that's being too safe..

That isn't even skimming the surface as to how far the insanity of "too safe" goes for me.

Oh, I see what you did there!

Man I feel your pain, I'm assuming you guys just wiped it all as opposed to paying the ransom?

Wipe, reload. Don't even think about it. If proper backups are in place, the pain should be relatively minimal. The pain really comes from the setting all this up properly in the beginning (both labor and monetary).

It's amazing how people really aren't setup for this, even companies that are hocking their services to us and how they supposedly have our data secured etc.

One of the many reasons why I am not a fan of this always on connectivity. Or any other service that is billed in the name of "convenience" (this is what got MS in trouble in the 9x days and not having proper multi-account, so "convenience" has come at a price for a long time)

 

[ikarasu]

Oh, I see what you did there!

Man I feel your pain, I'm assuming you guys just wiped it all as opposed to paying the ransom? I can't imagine our bookkeeping/inventory machines going down, it would take far more man hours than its even worth to get everything back to where it was, and would not necessarily be worth paying any ransom. In all honesty, shy of whatever outstanding invoices that would have to be tracked down, it could be a nice clean slate if it happened here...

Yeah. I'd rather start from scratch than pay a ransom.... even if It cost us more to start from scratch.

We have everything backed up, for the most part. Our server and all our VM's are backed up and actively protected - VMS /servers have 6 months worth of backups - they get a full backup every week, with incremental backups everyday... which then gets duplicated to our cloud backup that has "unlimited" backups... So if something like ransomware gets through and deletes all our main backups and re-uploads the images to our cloud backup... our cloud backup never deletes older ones, so it's just a matter of finding a backup before the malware came onto the PC.

THEN I have a 100 TB server at home that I also backup the backups onto So all our important stuff is covered.

Our Rip station, and our CNC station, as well as peoples desktops dont get backed up beyond the Desktop/documents being stored on the server getting backed up.... it was in hindsight, we figured all our files are backed up and fine, if anything else gets lost it's a quick image restore and we're back up. The malware of course made me realize All our profiles and custom samples and quicksets were a pain to get back. Luckily I keep manual documentation of custom CMYK colors for clients as well as printed samples/proofs in a book.... So it was just a bit of manual work getting it back up... took a few hours. it did make me realize the CNC also has al its custom tool configs as well as saved "artboards"...so now both of them are on our backup!


We got lucky. A sales rep PC got infected, It was a new varient that none of our software picked up... The sales reps PC was completely encrypted, then it hit the rip PC, then it it started to infect our server... But our server has protection and saw a ton of files starting to be encrypted and kept restoring the files from backup... So we only had 2 PC's that were demolished, and our server we just did a restore from a day before and it was backup instantly.

I got the alert from IT at 7 PM and I was in the office until 4 AM. I was doing everything that needed a physical pressence while our IT department was isolating the backups / ensuring our main servers that were infected with it but fighting it off didn't lose the battle. I had to cut everything off from the network so it didnt spread and manually check everyones PC's to figure out where it came from... then bring stuff back up and manually inspect it more. And even then it was days of constantly monitoring to make sure we didnt miss something.

The kicker? the owner of the company asked me why people end up paying if it's so easy to get back up and running... If we werent setup the way we were, or didnt notice it when we did.. It'd have been a whole different story.

We got VERY lucky that day (and this happened about 3 weeks ago...) I am considering isolating our production PC's just incase. Our production guys will cry, but I still believe no matter how good your system and protection is... there will always be hindsights and things that get overlooked and next time could be a lot worst. The company lost a day of production, which wasnt too bad as we can always catch up. but if our main server got hit... I dont know how we'd have recovered.


Long post! TLDR; Make backups. And backups of your backups. And offsite backups of your already offsite backups. You can never be too safe. At the very least buy a NAS And backup to it, and buy a $10 a month cloud service that it backs up to... You dont need to know about computers to have a "Basic" backup solution... and it could save your butt in the future.

 

[ikarasu]

That isn't even skimming the surface as to how far the insanity of "too safe" goes for me.




Wipe, reload. Don't even think about it. If proper backups are in place, the pain should be relatively minimal. The pain really comes from the setting all this up properly in the beginning (both labor and monetary).

It's amazing how people really aren't setup for this, even companies that are hocking their services to us and how they supposedly have our data secured etc.

One of the many reasons why I am not a fan of this always on connectivity. Or any other service that is billed in the name of "convenience" (this is what got MS in trouble in the 9x days and not having proper multi-account, so "convenience" has come at a price for a long time)

Look at the oil pipeline that just forked out a million because of ransomware.

Our IT company does work for our electrical company (We live in a big city, so its based here). I was told they were hit 3X in the span of 6 months with ransomware and paid $40k Each time to sweep it under the rug, get their files back and didnt tell anyone. I did a bit of googling on it when it happend... because of WFH, ransomware attacks make 6 trillion a year.... double the year befores. Heck, just yesterday 1500 business got hit by a ransomware attack at once.

If multi billion dollar companies dont have proper security, the odds of the sign shop down the street having it are slim to none

 

[WildWestDesigns]

The sales reps PC was completely encrypted, then it hit the rip PC, then it it started to infect our server... But our server has protection and saw a ton of files starting to be encrypted and kept restoring the files from backup... So we only had 2 PC's that were demolished, and our server we just did a restore from a day before and it was backup instantly.

This is more for the general readers here. One thing that I would suggest is to keep the machines that go online not able to "see" the production servers etc. Even if the WAN computers aren't mapped to the LAN servers, they may still get infected and then computers that are mapped to the LAN servers may also get infected.

And even if one is running a Mac and running Windows production machines, the Macs can act as a typhoid mary and get those production machines infected in much the same way (oh and yes Macs do have those lovely programs written for them as well (or there may be a universal exploit that affects all platforms like the PDF reading in the browser affected all OSs a few yrs back as that was a browser exploit, ironically for those that run Office on Mac, those lovely Excel macros can now be a booger for "you")

If multi billion dollar companies dont have proper security, the odds of the sign shop down the street having it are slim to none

It's not really a question of "if", but more of "when". About the only thing that anyone can really do is to help keep themselves from being low hanging fruit.

 

[Ade Kusuma]

Hello friends, i have problem that my cd disc software is broken, can anyone help me because i don't have backup software

if anyone can help me to copy the software cd, i don't mind if i have to pay
Thank you