works with windows vista

I got a new computer a few weeks ago, and up until this evening, it has been nothing but wonderful.  Vista works a little differently than XP, sure, but I was getting the hang of things.

With the advent of tax-return-season, the husband and I have decided to do some work on the basement.  It’s already finished, but we’d like to paint it and get some new furniture.  Which means I need my 3D house software installed on my new laptop, so I can arrange things virtually before we run out and buy desks and bookshelves that we end up hating.

No worries, the Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7 has a sticker on the box:  Works with Windows Vista.  That means I can just insert my installation cd and be good to go, right?

Wrong.

I inserted the disk, and told it to autorun startup.exe when I was prompted.  And then nothing happened.  At all.  So I tried again.  And got the same results.  I opened task manager, and sure enough, there were two startup.exe processes running.  So I end-processed them.  And they didn’t end.  So I end-processed them more furiously than before.  They would not be ended. 

I hollered to the basement at the husband.  He told me to reboot my machine, and then try a little run-as-XP-compatible trick.

Telling Vista to restart yielded no restarting, so I held the power button down until it took me seriously.  Upon restarting, I was happy to see no setup.exes in the task manager.

I inserted the install cd, but this time didn’t let it auto-run.  I opened it in Windows Explorer, found startup.exe, and right-clicked on it.  I selected properties, and found the compatibility tab.  And I checked the run-this-program-in-compatibility-mode-for box.  And then I hit ‘OK.’

And then I ran startup.exe as administrator, and allowed the program to run when Vista tried to save me from myself.

And it installed!

It put a little icon on my desktop, so I clicked it to start the program.  And then it told me I had to be an admin to run the program and to contact my sys admin, k thx.  I am the sys admin on my box.  And my user IS an admin, thank you very much.

So I right-clicked the shortcut icon and made it XP compatible.  And tried again.

It let me start the program.  Finally!

So don’t believe it when you see that little ‘Works with Windows Vista’ sticker. It might just mean ‘Works-with-windows-vista-when-you-install-as-XP-and-then-run-as-XP.