Installing & running WinDev 5.5 / 7.5 / 8 on Windows Vista computers

Hi all,

I still have to maintain a few old applications made with WinDev 5.5.

I had to phase out my 6 years old XP computer. Built a new one and installed Windows Vista 64-bit on it.

Bad news, there seems to be no way to install WinDev 5.5 on that computer. Before Vista service pack 1 I was told to install service pack 1 in order to get ntvdm.exe for running old 16-bit applications. SP1 is installed now but Vista still tells me to check whether a 32-bit or 64-bit version of that program is available ..

On my Vista 32-bit laptop the WD 5.5 install starts correctly but soon terminates with a 'WD553WDW.DLL not found' message.

WinDev 7.5 & WinDev 8 install runs up to the point where WinDev has to be started - on Vista 32-bit SP1 it still complains about not finding ntvdm.exe and on Vista 64-bit there is no error message but the program dies silently and leaves its starting image on the screen. That one can be removed only by restarting the computer ..

QUESTION: Has anyone managed to run WD 5.5 / 7.5 / 8 on a Vista computer and if so, what has to be done to make it do so?

Thanks for any hints!

Kind regards,
Guenter



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/2008 08:21AM by GuenterP.

Hi Guenter

Maybe not the answer you are looking for, but if your new machine is up to it you could run VMWare (Linux) and have multiple client OS's concurrently (XP, Vista etc). These days if your machine supports virtualisation extensions in hardware, you should get 95% of bare metal performance.

Might be a good solution for you

Cheers

Bob

Hi Guenter,

If your Vista computer has enough memory (3G and place on harddisk, why not install VmWare and virtualise an XP computer with the older versions of Windev.

VmWare does recognise the hardware dongle of windev, when insert after booting the virtual machine.

Sincerly,

Jf

Message forwarded from pcsoft.us.windev

Hi Bob & JF,

thank you for your advice !

1 - Microsoft Virtual PC: It's free and it's stable. But it doesn't support USB and therefore I had to uninstall this part. No USB dongle for WinDev ..

2 - Sun VirtualBox: It's free and by far not as stable as Virtual PC. They say it would support USB but warn about Vista 64 + USB somewhere. However, I installed it only to find out that I couldn't get it to recognize the PC Soft USB dongle.

3 - VMWare Virtual Workstation: Works fine with Windows XP Prof and all versions of WinDev, including WD5.5 ! Recognizes the dongle without any researches necessary. Drawback: It's US$ 189,- but sure, it's worth the money!

BTW: If experimenting with virtual machines, <b>do not activate your copy of Microsoft Windows XP at any point of the installation process</b> before it is fully defined (e.g. memory size, video drivers, disk size). Windows will react to any changes of the virtual environment and ask for a re-activation of Windows. End of story: Windows told me that that copy had been activated before and it wouldn't activate it a second time. Ok, I have to do a phone call on Monday, let's see ..

Thank you and kind regards,
Guenter



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/13/2008 05:11PM by GuenterP.