How to Make Old Programs Run on Windows Vista

Video Transcript

"Did you know that even programs made for Windows 2000 will run on Vista? Hi I'm Dan Afonso with Afonso Consulting and Enfold IT and this is how to run old programs in Vista. Now Vista handles a lot of the compatibility work behind the scenes. You are never going to see it, it just kind of works but there are going to be problems when the program needs very specific features with very specific operating systems or required administrative functions. A good example of this is that most video games generally assume that they have full reign of the machine and generally that is not actually a bad assumption but it is annoying on Vista because Vista instead of simply allowing this will typically pop up warnings so in order to try it out, first thing we are going to bring up something. I'm going to just grab a game here and if you just want to see that a game wasn't working or any program really wasn't working before, try it out and just right click on it and run it as administrator and obviously I am assuming you have full control of the machine and the administrator password. When you run it like this it will go in and run it under full privilege mode and that fixes the issue and what you now need to do is to right click on it, click on properties, go over to compatibility and check off run this program as administrator. This will always make it start up by default as an administrator. As a consequence of this when you do it it will pop up a warning every time you try to start the application. Another option you have is if it requires certain features, bugs, or quirks of a certain operating system there is an option under most of these under compatibility to run it in compatibility mode for whatever application you want. You can even go back as far as NT4.0 as your compatibility version allowing you to get some really old cranky applications to run under Vista. I'm Dan Afonso and this has been how to run older applications under Vista."