Ever wanted to run an old program on your new PC but it wouldn’t install?  I have.

I use a copy of Pagemaker 6.52 for summonses and all sorts of other stuff, but when I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit, the installer program refused to run.  Forget ‘run as’ – it doesn’t work.  Similarly (don’t ask!) I wanted to run a copy of Smartware 3 which I last used in the 1990s!

A search led me to Microsoft’s Windows XP emulator.  What a waste of time!  After hours of downloading and setting up and configuration, I was left with a limited and barely usable ghost of an operating system.

VMWare looked likely, so I downloaded and installed the free ‘Player’ version.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

I installed Windows XP onto it and now have multiple copies of that OS that I can use for testing purposes as well as actually using older programs.  I have one copy with Office 2003 and another with Office 2007, for example, that ensure that any products I build are not ‘contaminated’ by spurious files during testing that they can run in the different environments.  (I run Office 2010 on my main PC.)

I can now run Smartware …

… and any other programs that the latest and greatest will not even contemplate.