Greetings,

I have a cad program for work that will only function with MDAC 2.8, and therefore XP. Forget about trying to run it on a different OS than XP, if won't even let you install. I quite like windows 7 and don't want to be resricted to XP simply because of this program. I use it everyday however, so I need to find a solution.

It should be noted I'm no developer and just have a tinkering mind. I assume somewhere out there is a solution to mount an earlier version of MDAC/SQL/Jet - whatever, on Windows 7 through a virtual drive or something else creative. I started looking for a solution but wasn't finding anything that seemed obvious.

Out of frustration I just wiped my computer and installed windows 7 and XP in a dual boot configuration. Not ideal at all but it's a start.

I was tinkering the other day and wondered, from windows 7, if there was a possibility that I could call upon the program.

From W7, I explored to my other drive that has XP and my program on it, created a short cut, and put it on the dektop of w7.

I wasn't expecting anything to happen but when I double clicked on it, I got a pop up asking saying "no hardware key found" (the program has a security measure requring you to insert a usb key before it will launch).

I was really surprised that the program actually tried to initalize. I put my key card in, praying it would work, but I got a no data sources or engine found - I forget the exact message, but it's clear that SQL and the other necessary database components are"sleeping" in XP when I am logged into W7.

At this point my curiousity is really going. In my situation, while I'm in W7, is it possible call, "wake up" and run SQL or whatever else that is seemingly dormant that I need to run my program? I tried to explore through my XP drive while in W7 and double click on important looking SQL icons (told you I'm no DBA) but always got errors or nothing happened.

There must be a way..any ideas? Have I overlooked any other solutions all together that may even be easier.

Thank you for the time.

I don't think that there's any way to run your program and access W7 resources using dual boot.

If you are using Windows 7 Ultimate, you might be able to use the XP emulation mode to allow you to install your XP CAD application. This allows you to fool an application into thinking that it is running on XP using WOW features that are only enabled in Windows Ultimate.

If you aren't running Windows 7 Ultimate, then I think that you'll have to use something like Virtual PC. This isn't likely to be as elegant as the XP emulation mode, but it would probably work.

-PatP