[willylif]

I have been using Lotus123R24 on my Dell windows XP desktop. I plan to buy a new computer when Windows 7 arrives. I would like to continue using Lotus123R24, a DOS program. Will it load and run on Windows & ?

[smax013]

I do not honestly know.

You could download the Release Candidate and try: http://www.microsoft...7/download.aspx

[bbvammy]

wow ... someone still use DOS programs?

[kiko1125]

same here i still use dos doc's for work still

[piyushsingh]

I m not sure as i haven't tried it.

But there is always dosbox , which can emulate CPU to run old dos programs. I use it on vista x64 to run 16-bit DOS applications easily. This should also work on win7.

[smax013]

piyushsingh said:

I m not sure as i haven't tried it.

But there is always dosbox , which can emulate CPU to run old dos programs. I use it on vista x64 to run 16-bit DOS applications easily. This should also work on win7.

Not to mention most virtual machine programs (such as Parallels and VMWare and maybe even VirtualBox) should be able to run the full DOS OS just fine (assuming you have DOS install disks sitting around).

[ngompa13]

Well, here is the scoop. Windows 32-bit, including Windows 7 can run DOS applications, but it is horribly unreliable in Windows 7.

Windows 64-bit CAN NOT run DOS applications because Microsoft didn't bother to put in a 486 emulator into NTVDM for 64-bit Windows, so it doesn't exist because CPUs running in 64-bit mode cannot execute 16-bit code under normal circumstances.

Note that this also means that 16-bit Windows applications will not work either, including InstallShield's famous 16-bit stub kernel launcher, which is used in quite a few Windows application installers that are based on InstallShield. WISE installers did the same thing as well.