I made the mistake of upgrading to Vista and have had all kinds of
problems with just about everything that I used to run, including
Protel 99 SE. I have hard drive drawers in my PC and I finally decided
to set up an XP drive with tools such as 99 SE on it. However, if you
MUST use Vista you may be able to make Protel work. In the limited
testing that I did I found that everything seems to work except the
function that adds libraries. You can open library files and edit
them, and you can remove libraries from a project. However, once you
have removed a library you cannot re-select it. A work-around would be
to rename your library to the same name as the default library in the
Protel directory and then copy it over top of the default library.
This goes for both SCH and PCB libraries. Yes, I tried the various
compatibility modes - no success. I suspect that it has something to
do with file PERMISSIONS. Protel consists of a gazillion little EXE
files that it calls SERVERS, and I suspect that there may be a problem
with the library server having the right permissions, but I spent more
time than I should have and did not get it to work. If anyone out
there has solved the LIBRARY problem please let us know. I suppose it
it time to cough up the bucks for Altium Designer!!??
May I suggest something.
Try to create another Main Programs folder. and re-install there.
Vista has the Program Files folder tree some what locked down and hard
to work around how ever. I did find that if you create a new folder tree
from the Root using simple names so that older program don't get
confused it seem to work for many programs i have how ever, there is
still some problems with Vista that has not been solved and is not
security issues. It seems that some apps not all that i tested, will
start failing things like pop down menus that no longer seem to have a
function any more and so on after you have worked with the app for
some time.. when it starts doing this. I need to shut it down and wait,
it them seems a lot of disk activity is taking place. then I restart it
and they will work again.
THis is not just one program, it's like 4 out of 8 programs i use is
doing this.
so oh well.
I had Vista on my new laptop which originally came with XP pro.
Panasonic suggested Vista so I bought it and installed it..
That was a mistake., every program I had that required the use of the
serial port would stop working or miss behave after some time using the
functions in the apps that applied to the serial port. It almost look
like back in the days when you ran out of system resources.
so I remove Vista and attempted to install XP pro SP2. when I say
attempted it was not fun. It seems that some how the bios in the laptop
got altered. and when you start and install of XP, it reboots the laptop
after the first cycle to get things started and ends up booting
something that is still looking for Vista code. The only thing I can
come up with here is that Vista changed something in the bios.
Look like it wasn't loading it's boot sector from the normal place.
any ways. After looking at the resource CD that comes with the laptop,
there was a Flash restore utility disk. that corrected that problem.
Now we have XP pro SP2 on the laptop, all my programs work fine now.
