Transfering an old program?

[Stormwalker]

If anyone has time, let me know if you can think of anything to help my dilemma here.

So, one of the partners at the accounting firm I work at purchased a new laptop. Her old laptop she figured she would give to one of the employees for fieldwork. The thing is old, but useable, and she wanted everything erased from it with a new o/s install, so it ended up in my office. It's using Windows Me, so it will get a fresh install of Windows XP. However, an old program we used to use was discovered to be on this thing. It is called "Workpapers Plus for Windows", made by Creative Solutions. Evidently the install discs were floppies for this program and one of the floppy disks is now unreadable. This laptop that is slated to get nuked is the only computer we have that has this program on it, and I guess they would like to save it if possible in any way.

I've tried searching for this program on the web to no avail. This program is also no longer available for purchase through Creative Solutions (we are now using their "CS suite" accounting software package). Is there any way to install this program onto another computer based on the already installed program on the laptop? I figure I'm out of luck on this, but figured it would be worth a shot to post this up before I nuke the thing.

Thanks for any replies.

 

[IanG]

You can try just copying the instal folder to a different machine and then running the .exe. If you get lucky that'll work, then just create a shortcut and put it in the start menu.

If that doesn't work, you could try manually looking for keys in the registry and recreating them in the new system.

If neither of those work... :shrug:

 

[Mister Natural]

Another option might be to open all the files you have with that program and save them in a different format which is more easily recognized by other programs. Yeah it might be a big job if you have a lot of files, but it's not good to be stuck with a legacy program.

If it's an old win98 program then another thing you can try is copying the program onto the new pc. Check the win.ini and system.ini files for any references, add them to the new pc if they exist and then try to launch the program. You'll probably get error messages such as "missing file xxxx.xxx". Look for it in the windows/system or windows/system32 directory and copy it onto the new pc. You may have to hunt for ini files specific to that program in the windows directory also. Rinse repeat process until the program runs. You may not have to worry about registry entries if the program is old enough.