Re: DOS app icons Under Vista (A Fix?)

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:
> I didn't "direly warn" against launching with BAT files. I was
> simply saying that BAT files are completely unnecessary (which
> is different!) and superseded by the Properties of a PIF|LNK.

I THOUGHT you had said that M$ deprecated them. My mistake.
> First, my Vista 'Ultimate' PIFs and
> LNKs flatly reject PNGs, and will accept only ICOs and icons
> embedded in DLLs and EXEs. The examples that I've seen on the
> Net all have an *.ICO extension (even if compressed with PNG).
> Also, the Net examples are large files, e.g. 100Kb+. I tried
> the tiny PNGs that Jeff and Flash uploaded -- none work, even
> renamed as ICOs (I tried a bunch, I think at least one from each
> of gentleman). Am I missing something here? Must be!

No, I think that was a red herring. I couldn't change the icon to
my desktop shortcut to Xy from the blank piece of white paper
icon that is M$'s default for a DOS app (or even for
command.com). When I reported that here, several people said
Vista required a different icon format, viz. PNG, and converted
all my old Xy icons to it.

When that still didn't work, and I found the same thing happened
with command.com and dbase5.exe, I did a little Web browsing and
discovered that's a known "feature" of Vista. Then Bry pointed me
to Ed Mendelson's site, where I found the same workaround you're
suggesting: make the shortcut point to cmd.exe, with "/c
d:\xy4\editor.exe" appended (where "d:\xy4\editor.exe" is the
fully qualified path to editor.exe). And that works fine.

 Second,
> my old ICOs from Win2K|WinXP work perfectly -- I don't
> understand what the fuss is about.

Assigned to command.com? Or directly to a DOS app? Because when I
tried that (and another guy, last March, was posting queries to
several forums with the same problem), the Change Icon tab was
there on the pif properties page, and one could choose the icon
and click OK, but Apply remained grayed out, and the desktop icon
was STILL the blank piece of white paper.

 Third, you can easily trick
> Vista (and preceding M$ OpSyses) to accept CMD.EXE in a PIF by
> creating a PIF in the first instance (e.g. make a Shortcut for
> EDITOR.EXE), then go into Properties and prepend to the Target
> (or Cmd) line, on the Program tab,
> "%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe /c " so that the whole line reads
> "%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe /c d:\path\editor.exe[optional
> switches]". The Shortcut *will* remain a PIF.
Very interesting. I tried that. But you still CANNOT change the
icon. Only a lnk can have a different icon than that blank piece
of white paper. And if it started out a pif, it stays a pif, even
if the cmd line is exactly identical to that of a lnk. At least
on my system. But I recall that Robert said he cleaned out a lot
of the eye-candy and other detritus/offal/unprintable epithet
that M$ clutters up its systems with. So maybe he managed to do
an end-run around this piece of BBBG's officiousness? I turned
off that wretched popup that keeps telling you you don't have
permission, and set all the views to classic, but I don't know
how to do much more.
(Robert, I can send you a screen shot showing the pif properties
page and the adjacent icon on the desktop if you want. Don't want
to burden the rest of the list with a jpg. I know that not
everyone has broadband, since I don't myself).
But see my post of Sunday: the difference between a pif and a lnk
seems somewhat moot since you cannot in fact (despite what the
pif properties page mendaciously tells you) assign RAM to an app
under Vista from either.
> Fourth, why do
> you need a Memory tab? Allocating EMS for... what? If the
> PCLEX dictionaries (as alternatives to Microlytics), OK, yes.
> But otherwise... for what?
Not so much EMS (I don't use the PCLEX dictionaries), but I've
had Xy crash when handling many or large files if "Uses HMA"
wasn't checked. Even (or, you would say "especially"?) under 9x.
But the other day I ran a long SE (using the U2 routine) of a
large directory on the Vista laptop, and it went swimmingly;
that's something that sometimes causes Xy to freeze up or crash
on 9x (and it could well be 9x to blame). dBase 5 for DOS,
however, wants 8 Mb of DOS Protected mode RAM. I need to run it
and see how it functions with no RAM allocation.

And welcome back. I feared you'd washed your hands of us--not
that I'd blame you.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx