I still have to run a virtualbox for some of my code but I am slowly porting it over to use direct TCP calls. This broke the GPIB interface for my controllers. Changing to 2011 was fine, until I went to Windows 10. NIs response was buy our USB serial adapters. How you mess up a serial port, when the OS is handling it for you, I have no idea but someone there figured it out. At one point they redid all their serial communications which rendered it useless. Typically, they will drop support for hardware. That and I have been burned by upgrading. I would upgrade more often if I saw any need for it but really my projects are fairly simple so I just stay with what works. I did pick up the 2014 home edition with the watermark which has helped me port code but that's pretty much all I use it for. This is why I am still running the older 32-bit version. Similar to their 64-bit version of LabView. I looked at NXG and saw they had removed some features I use a lot. I love it personally, perfect for 'I need to control/measure this now' use. I think NXG is free to try if you have current service. OG LabVIEW is aggravating if its the sort of thing you do 3 times a year, IMO. oh, forgot to set this or that abstracted variable to the right thing, forgot to make that wire right, forgot to error trap properly. With old LabVIEW, if I didn't have appropriate old code, I would mess around for 30 minutes trying to do the same, looking up things along the way, and sometimes it.just wouldn't work. I can do this in a couple of minutes with NXG, total no-brainer. Sometimes all I want to do is grab some analog input levels and graph them. NXG maybe less capable but is much simpler to get started with.

LabVIEW has gotten extremely bloated and complex, many people like me just gave up on it years ago because we weren't using it full time, and it was impossible to keep up with all of the changes year/year and the nuances.

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