Re: XyWrite IV on Vista

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- On Mon, 11/3/08, Robert Holmgren  wrote:

> preparatory to turning my old machine into a Web server and
> restoring XySearch):

Good news.

> but I suspect that whatever caused
> that problem within the Virtual DOS Machine (ntvdm) was
> discovered and fixed. I should note that I replaced the
> preloaded NVidia "Aero" video driver for Vista on
> this ThinkPad
> with the latest (non-Aero) driver for XP, in order to get
> fullscreen VGA to run XyWrite and other DOS apps. That
> means
> that I sacrifice Windows Media Center and some other visual
> perks, but I don't care (PowerDVD is so much better
> anyway, and for everything else there's Media Player Classic --
> WMC just gobbles CPU cycles).

Your comments on popular misconceptions re Vista compatibility issues are encouraging. 

> Vista has it's own quirks and irritations, but I have
> found that with a considerable amount of tweaking and disabling
> (especially of User Access Control and of the [preloaded] truly
> hideous Symantec security suite), it is fast and very
> satisfying.

If you have a set of notes re just what / where / how these adjustments were made, I'm sure others
here would find them of great benefit.

> One last observation: Vista seems always to issue a
> warning when I install legacy programs on this box. That
> warning is triggered because the program is not officially
> supported by Microsoft. But the warning _implies_ that the
> program won't install, won't launch, and will not work --
> might even do harm! It implies that you have to upgrade
> (which, for things like Acrobat Pro, means real money).
> Nonsense! Everything I've installed works fine. I had to
> trick the machine into installing Acrobat v7.10 and Visual
> Studio 6 SP6, but when I finally got those programs on the box,
> they work normally.
> Ditto for Nero Burning ROM and many many others. XyWin
> doesn't work, but neither did it work (for me) under Win2K or
> XP -- I suspect a conflict with my printer driver -- other
> Win16 (Windows v3.x vintage) apps run just fine. NBWin runs
> perfectly, as long as you add VB40016.dll and OC25.dll from
> some old machine to [BootDrive]:\WINDOWS\system (NOT
> system32!).
>
> FWIW...
>
But I would imagine there must be some exceptions. For example, there were many reports that
MusicMatch (the last couple free versions before someone else took it over and ruined it) won't run
under XP, and so perhaps not under anything post XP. That was a very good program. XyWin is *not*
one of the ones I would miss, however.


 Jordan