Telling Windows to Lie

As most of you know, I work one half day a week at my daughters’ elementary school teaching a technology enrichment class to 4th, 5th and 6th graders.  In addition, I supply any IT needs that the teachers may occaisionally need, which has been very little as of late.

Last week, i was asked by the 1st grade teacher to assist getting a game installed on one of her classroom computers.  The computer runs Windows XP with 512 MB of RAM and has not traditionally been a “problem” machine.  When I asked her what the issue was, she told me that every time tried to install the game, an error telling her to upgrade her machine to Windows 95 appeared.

This is a very interesting problem, to say the least.  What happened was this particular program, which was written over a decade ago, was coded to query the operating system for its version.  If the program found that the Windows version was not Windows 95, then to abort the installation and display an error instructing the upgrade.  I guess the programmers of this particular game had no foresight or maybe were just pessimists — who knew someone would still be playing their game 13 years later?

Apparently, this is not an isoloated issue, as Microsoft provides a documented way to work around this problem.  The answer lies in something called Compatibility Mode, and its nothing short of telling Windows to lie.

The way we access this feature is opening the properties of a program’s shortcut.  Once there, we’ll see a Compatibility tab.  After clicking it, we’ll see a number of options we can select to make our new Windows play nice with programs designed for older Windows.  What effectively happens is that whenever a program asks Windows what version it is, Windows reports whatever version we decide to tell it to report.  So, instead of our elementary school teacher’s computer telling the truth and saying, “I’m a Windows XP” machine, it crosses its proverbial fingers and says, “I’m a <ahem> Windows 95 machine”.

I applied this setting to the problematic program for the teacher I was helping.  The program, happy with this answer, worked like a charm from then out.  Problem solved.

Making a computer lie, especially in a Christian school, is just too fun of a solution!