Windows 7 and old software

Kotu

Kotu

Kotu

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
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886
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To explain the situation a bit, my father was complaining about his dragon naturally speaking missing quite a few words (speech to text program) and the cause was his cpu not having enough power. He's dyslexic so the speech to text and text to speech software are quite important. So I built him a faster PC from second hand bits and gave him a copy of windows 7 i had spare. Upgrade was:

2GHz single core -> 2.5GHz quad core
1GB DDR -> 4GB DDR2
80GB IDE -> 1TB samsung
ati 8500 -> nvidia 9800GTX+
xp -> w7 64bit

Quite a big jump.

What I didn't plan for was how old some of the software he used was along with OS incompatibility. A rundown of the software:

Adobe Pagemaker 4 -> installer doesn't run but I managed to get it working by dragging the software from the old hard drive and then copying any missing DLL files.

Read&Write 8 -> installs fine, but won't read from any pages, ive tried running as admin and in compatibility mode for vista/2000/xp/98, upgrading to read&write 10 is out of the question since its £140 :(

Adobe photodeluxe 2 -> think this came free with a printer, hes used it to make loads of business cards but the software wont run on w7. If i try and drag the business card files into indesign on my own PC then all the text on them vanishes.

Are there any good alternatives for read&write 8? hes after something you can swipe text and make it read, but in other programs (like pagemaker). Most of the text reader software ive found so far just reads everything on the page including menus/title bars which isn't useful when he just wants it to repeat a paragraph here and there.

The only idea i've been able to come up with so far is to install vmware and run his old xp install inside windows 7, it feels a bit daft to do all these upgrades just so he can carry on using 10 year old software though :(
 
Hmm, I would install XP onto the new machine so he can carry on using his old software. XP will still be good for a few years yet and it will buy you time to save up for new versions. VM would work but I don't really see the point of booting Win7 to boot into XP, you might as well get straight to the point. I'm guessing the copy of XP is 32 bit so you won't be able to use all of the RAM but that would be the least of my worries.
 
Which version of Windows 7 are you using? I think for Professional and Ultimate you can install XP Mode which runs as a VM but you don't see the VM booting in the background, it looks and feels like you are using it in Windows 7, and shortcuts and start menu appear in Windows 7.
I use XP Mode for running an XP scanner that is unsupported in Windows 7 and also a USB FM Radio stick/app.
 
Nanobot said:
Which version of Windows 7 are you using? I think for Professional and Ultimate you can install XP Mode which runs as a VM but you don't see the VM booting in the background, it looks and feels like you are using it in Windows 7, and shortcuts and start menu appear in Windows 7.
I use XP Mode for running an XP scanner that is unsupported in Windows 7 and also a USB FM Radio stick/app.
Click to expand...

This,

Get Windows 7 Pro and use XP mode, you can run apps inside a silent XP VM and they look like they are part of windows 7. It will take a minute or 2 for the first virtual app to open as it boots the VM, but other than that you cant tell the difference.
 
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