On 5/18/2011 3:50 AM, Roger Tremblay wrote:

> I have a customer who is reluctant to move to a windows environment and is

> running a win7 64bit virtual machine and is running dbase (dos) version

As several others have said, you cannot run DOS programs directly in

64-bit Windows. There appear to be two general solutions:

a) A "virtual machine", i.e., XP Mode, VirtualBox, VMWare, etc., which

involves setting up a second "Virtual" PC inside your physical system,

which contains an operating system that will run your DOS programs.

b) A "sandbox" program which creates a DOS environment directly. The

only example I'm aware of is DOSBox.

The problem with a) is that you have to buy and install the second OS,

and maintain it. Depending on which one you use, switching back and

forth can be a bit complicated. All in all, not terribly simple.

From my limited experience, b) is a whole lot simpler. Cheap, too

(it's free!). My client doesn't have a problem (yet), he's still

running Win NT! But I do, since I dumped my old laptop I no longer have

an XP machine - I'm all Win7-64. So what do I do if he has a problem?

Took me about a half-hour to download, install, and test DOXBox, and it

works just fine. Believe me, it will take you a lot longer to get XP

Mode working!

If you have an entire enterprise system of 16-bit programs then I don't

think DOSBox will do it, but in that case you've got lots bigger

problems than 16-bit compatibility.

Give DOSBox a try. (Where is it? If you can't find it via Google, you

probably wouldn't be able to run it anyway! <g>)

Dan Covill

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