Are you wondering if the ActiveState product you want to use will work on Windows 7?
The short answer is “Yes. All our stuff works on Windows 7.” That includes our language distributions (ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl), and our desktop developer tools (Komodo IDE, Perl Dev Kit, Tcl Dev Kit).
You might not find a reference to the specific flavor of Windows you want to know about on the web site, but a brief explanation of our product life cycle should make it clear which ActiveState product is supported with which OS releases.
After a new variant of an operating system is officially released, we start producing new versions of our products which work on it. As we prepare new releases, we test them against the variants of that system that the vendor itself is still supporting. When a vendor drops support for an operating system variant, we stop testing against that variant.
This means:

  • Since every ActiveState product has had multiple releases since Windows 7 shipped, we support Windows 7 with all the current versions of these products.
  • Since Window 7 was released in November 2009, no release prior to that was quality assured on Windows 7.
  • Since we didn’t support any of our products on the pre-release versions of Windows 7, the first releases shipped after Windows 7 was released were the ones to get the first set of any patches for Windows 7-related issues. Since no testing process ever exposes all issues which might be encountered with a new operating system, later releases will have fixes for additional problems that are found in the wild.

The same things apply to Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2003 and XP Service Packs. If you’re still using Windows 2000, Microsoft wants you to upgrade.
One more thing that’s important to notice: You might be very attached to your old version of our product, but if you’re moving to a newer version of Windows, you won’t be able to assume that your old product will work. We don’t do regression testing on our products after they are out of support, and patch sets are always distributed as part of a new version of our product. If you move to a new Windows, you should move to the latest set of ActiveState products. You can always see the latest versions available for download here including:

Title photo courtesy of Tadas Sar on Unsplash.