I came a across an application today that wouldn’t install on Vista, reporting that my computer required Windows NT 4 or later. In order to get the install to run on Vista, I created a shim which let it run on Vista.
What’s a shim? There’s not a lot of simple explanations around, but basically it’s some instructions to the OS for how to run a program. In particular, how to handle compatibility issues by telling the operating system how to run the program. With this you can tell the computer to run something on Vista like it would on XP or Windows 98.
The steps involved are pretty well documented on thelazyadmin, but I’ll add a couple of things.
Firstly, you need to download and install Application Compatibility Toolkit.
Then follow thelazyadmin’s guide to create your shim.
Last, run
sdbinst “path_to_my.sdb”
to implement your shim and then see how your program runs!
