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Re: Getting Xy4Dos Up & Running on T61 with XP-Pro



I'd just copy over EDITOR.EXE from your disk. See if that does it.
Sorry to report that following Patricia's crystal clear instructions gave me yet another lovely desktop shortcut to a 1-second XyWrite session. It opened editor, and a second later it crashed just as before and as it did after each of the other proposed solutions. If neither Carl, nor Robert nor Harry nor Patricia has the solution, it seems doubtful that a solution is possible. And yet it must be. Any other ideas? Fresh copy of the whole program from XyWrite.com? I have my 4.017 disks, although the laptop, of course, has no diskdrive. I could copy the TTG disks into my office network and then back onto the laptop ...
--Peter G

Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
Robert Holmgren wrote:

Sometimes STARTUP.INT just crashes Editor, for no obvious reason
at all. It happens especially on my computers when I haven't
rebooted the whole machine for a long time. Memory gets goofed
up or something.
Very interesting. I had the same thing that Peter is reporting (Xy
flashes on screen, then vanishes) once, when I was porting it from a 98
to a W2K or XP machine (cannot recall which now). Of course, I was trying
to use the load-by-means-of-a-batchfile method that I had used all
through DOS and W9x, and I assumed it was something in the way XP handles
batchfiles. Startup.int, IIRC, had nothing to do with it.
What might have something to do with it, though, is Read-only or Archive
bits set on the files or folders involved, esp. if you copied from the 98
machine to a CD and then to the XP one. Open a DOS prompt and command
ATTRIB -R -A c:\xy4\*.* /s
That should clear any such settings, if they're the spanner in the works.
Anyway, after Robert persuaded me to stop trying to launch with a batchfile, I took to always running Xy from a cmd.exe, not a command.com, VDM. This was chiefly to get the icons I want to display always and everywhere, but I have generally found it quite as stable and usable as a commend.com VDM.
So give that a try: right click on your desktop, choose New, then
Shortcut. (I'm working on W2K here, so some things may be slightly
different on XP.) Carefully type in in the window that opens:
%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe
Click on Next until the shortcut is finished, then right-click on it, choose Properties. In the Target window, carefully append to
%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe
a space, followed by /c c:\xy4\editor.exe
Assuming c:\xy4 is editor.exe's directory. Put that directory in the slot that says "Start in", and put "Normal Window" in the one that says "Run in".
While you're at it, on the Shortcut tab, click Change icon and put
something other than the c:\ prompt there, so you know when you're
calling Xy. (There are probably some icons in your Xy directory if you
copied it over; browse there.)
If double-clicking on that shortcut works, you're in business. Now right
click on the blue bar at the top of Xy's working screen, Choose
Properties, then Fonts, and choose a font (your initial one may be very
small; enlarging the font automatically enlarges the size of the window).
I forget whether setting memory values really takes in XP; I know it is
absolutely a Potemkin Village in Vista. But I have fewer memory problems
in both that I did in 9x.
I'm tempted to wonder, for the 999th time, how people manage with their
data folders on C: along with the opsys and programs. Having a separate
data partition is _so_ much more convenient.


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx