catgate Posted April 27, 2009 Report Share Posted April 27, 2009 Background.My friend with the garage has for a good number of years used a DOS based programme for every day use in keeping track of all his customers, cars, repairs, parts, hours, servicing, billing, wages etc and his whole operation is built around it. He has this on an elderly laptop running on W98SE, because this has the required compatibility, and he takes it home to his office each day to print off the days bills etc.He had a panic a while ago when, for some reason, the on/off switch misbehaved a couple of times.As a precaution a “refurbed” IBM Thinkpad was acquired and it came with XP Pro SP2 installed. Problem.How to persuade a DOS based programme to run on this replacement laptop (notebook)? I have had a look on Google and there seems to be complications which ever way I look. I think the easiest way may be to simply wipe XP and reformat the HD and put on W98SE. I rather think that for just running “Garagemaster” all the updates and things will be unnessesary. The only thing will be that the 20 GB HD will not be useable to capacity.There appears to be a way of making XP do it, but it does look very messy, and seems to necessitate making dummy autoexec.bat and config.sys files and some how switching them in and out as required, but still leaving XP as the parent system.Another way seems to be by using a Virtual Machine, which again looks a bit messy and complex.I would be more than grateful for advice.I have been poking about with it this morning and this is the machine according to Belarc :-IBM 26472 TG NotebookXP Pro. SP2 Pentium III 1GHz256 RAM20 GB HDDVD ROM No Floppyformatted NTFS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb Posted April 28, 2009 Report Share Posted April 28, 2009 The first question is: did he or you actually try to run that old program on XP (in compatibility mode)?And the next question - which should actually be the first: is that DOS program “Garagemaster” a commercial program, and is there perhaps a newer Windows version available? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catgate Posted April 28, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 28, 2009 Thanks for replying Pat.The first question is: did he or you actually try to run that old program on XP (in compatibility mode)?And the next question - which should actually be the first: is that DOS program “Garagemaster” a commercial program, and is there perhaps a newer Windows version available?I have been poking about with it this morning and....Most of this "poking" was trying to run it in compatibility mode. This was when I found out that autoexec.bat and config.sys came into play and needed to be altered ....but there appeared to be neither in XP.That was when I thought it might be easier just wipe the HD, because he will not use the Laptop for anything else and I think, from enquiries I made some months ago, the use of the current "Garagemaster" programme would require quite a lot of change to the way my friend operates. Also It is not particularly cheap and additionally he is familiar with DOS one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted April 28, 2009 Report Share Posted April 28, 2009 Make sure you can run the laptop with w98 before wiping everything Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catgate Posted April 28, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 28, 2009 Make sure you can run the laptop with w98 before wiping everythingThat is an interesting piece of advice, rong. Is there some peculiar reason why it might not? I am assuming that if the HD is formatted it should just install. Are you thinking that the W98SE drivers will not be suitable? I suppose that there may be something that does not just fit as it should, but what had you in mind? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted April 28, 2009 Report Share Posted April 28, 2009 The drivers as you say, just make sure you can get them all first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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