Microsoft Windows Vista
Last year I decided to check out the Beta release of Microsoft Vista to see what the impact would be on TrackPro. The initial installation took over 3 hours on a computer with a Pentium 3.0 GHz processor with 1 GB of memory. This was not a promising start. The disk footprint for this installation was over 9 GB! (This has gotten a little better in the released version it’s now only 8GB. Windows XP has a footprint of about 2.6 GB.
TrackPro installed OK and actually ran on the first attempt. However I found that during the testing the Help file was no longer functional. A little detective work showed that the winhlp32.exe was missing. This is the program that reads the 32 bit version of the standard Windows HLP file.
On the Microsoft site I found the following:
The Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) program is no longer included with Windows operating systems starting with Windows Vista
...Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) is a Help program that has been included with Microsoft Windows versions starting with the Microsoft Windows 3.1 operating system. WinHlp32.exe is required in order to display 32-bit help content files that have the “.hlp” file name extension.
I beg to differ, WinHlp32.exe is a 32-bit program, the last I looked Win 3.1 was 16-bit Operating System. Just to make matters even more ridiculous, the 16-bit version of the of WinHlp32.exe (WinHelp.exe) is included in Vista just in case you need to run the same help files you were using 15 years ago under Windows 3.1!
So what’s the big deal here? All I have to do is rewrite the the 550 article help file in HTML and compile it. That shouldn’t take more than a week or two. $%&^!
Here’s an update
Microsoft has now made the old help engine available as a download.
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2008-05-17 1:12 pm , Leave a Reply
Al Weisenborn