Re: XP setup for xywrite

[Lisa Kleinholz lkleinholz@xxxxxxxx]

Thank you to Patricia. I followed these instructions on my new netbook (Acer Aspire One, running XP Home), and it works like a charm.

Lisa

From: Lisa Kleinholz 
To: Lisa Kleinholz 
Sent: Thu, June 17, 2010 1:04:42 PM
Subject: XP setup for xywrite


Caesarwien@xxxxxxxx wrote:
How do I get DOS + XYWRITEf onto VISTA?  kurt/Je-06-10

DOS is there already (Microsludge doesn't think you need to
know
it, but it's there). Open your C:\ drive in Explorer, navigate
to
\Windows\System32, and look for cmd.exe. Make 2 shortcuts to it

on your desktop. Leave one as it is; you can click on it
anytime
you want to run some old DOS command like DIR, XCOPY, MEM, and
the like.
Don't try to ïnstall Xy; find a machine where it's running (I
can
mail you a CD or send you a ZIP of the whole megillah). Edit
all
the config files (http://startup.int, settings.dfl, xywwweb.reg,
xy4.kbd, and any others you've made) to reflect the drive
structure of your new setup; that is, if you were running xy
off
drive D:, in a directory called XY4, and in the new system that

DIR is going to be on c:\DOSapps (as I had to do on my Netbook
when I discovered that XP Home gets terminally confused if you
have 2 SD cards in the system)). Save those files to the new
directory, copy everything else there.
If you want to be a diehard, you can just create your shortcut
 to
editor.exe. But on Carl's advice, I've been doing the following

on XP and Vista since I got them. Right click on that 2d
CMD.exe
shortcut you created.
Choose Properties. In the box labeled Target, type
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c d:\Xy4\Editor.exe
(note that there is a space before and after "\c"),

substituting the fully qualified path name of editor.exe's directory.
In the box for Start in, enter editor.exe's directory.
In the font tab choose whatever you like (I use Lucida Console
 16
point, being highly myopic).
In the layout tab, set Window size to width 80, length 25; you
can experiment with changing them later if you like; to what
degree you can will depend somewhat on your screen and video
bios.
Lastly, on the Shortcut tab, choose Change Icon; I believe Bry
Henderson posted a collection of Xy icons on his site a few
years
ago, if you don't have one.
And that's it. I run Xy thus on the XP Home netbook and two
Vista
machines, with no problems--unless I do something stupid, which
 I
do sometimes.
As for XyWin, I think the problem may be not (as I had been
thinking) BIOS but memory. On the Netbook (running XP Home) I
had
copied the whole thing over from the live hard drive of an
otherwise dead system. I could click on XyWin's executable, and

it would start, but because I had not edited the configuration
files, it kept complaining "Cannot find file..." So I finally
sat
down and edited all the config files. And then it started to
load
and hung with "There is not enough memory to perform the
operation." I had to go to the 3-fingered salute to unfreeze
the
machine. That box is now in the shop (battery died, fortunately

still under warranty, and the manufacturer wanted the whole
thing
back to make sure it wasn't the charging mechanism or the power

pack). But when I get it back I'm going to run MEM /C under
varied circumstances and see what I get. Except, of course,
that
MEM is a shell game under everything from XP up: you can have
two
DOS apps open (Xy4 and dBase5 in my case), and be told that
there
is so much lower DOS memory. They CANNOT both be sitting in the

lower 640.
And yes, you can use a USB thumb drive to copy the files. Or
even
run them off it, using either Robert's or Carl's Portable
configuration. Because I print from Xy, and therefore want
access
to Ghostscript and gsview, I tend to prefer an installed set
up;
but portable has lots of advantages.
--

Lisa Kleinholz
413-687-7464 (cell)
mailto:lkleinholz@xxxxxxxx
mailto:lkleinholz@xxxxxxxx