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

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

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.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx