compatibility mode

[cliffski]

Does anyone know where to find out exactly what XP does when you select win98 compaibility under a programs shortcut compatibility tab?
I have a user who has crashes which are fixed by selecting this option, and I was wondering if anyone knew where to find a technical explanantion of what it does.
I can't find any anywhere....

[Ricardo Vladimiro]

To answer your question: it creates or changes an entry on the windows registry key: HKEY_USERS\%USER%\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

You can get a toolkit and some (little) detail here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;301911

Hope this helps.

V

[MadSage]

Basically compatibility modes emulate things from the older versions that have changed in Windows XP, such as registry changes which Ricardo mentioned, path fixes (eg. desktop), returning old version info, old style heap emulation. There are many other changes which are emulated, but I'm not sure what they are - I've never seen them listed before, and I doubt Microsoft have ever published them. If you look into the differences between Windows 9x and XP/NT, that should give you some clues if you really want to know. A major change is of course the way in which drivers work.

[cliffski]

my user experiences random crashes, even when the game isnt doing anything, so I'm assuming at this stage it's a video driver related bug.
If only video card companies would make 100% stable drivers first, and worry about fancy control panels second.

[GBGames]

my user experiences random crashes, even when the game isnt doing anything, so I'm assuming at this stage it's a video driver related bug.
If only video card companies would make 100% stable drivers first, and worry about fancy control panels second.

Heh, the open source drivers available for Nvidia and ATI apparently work great, but they aren't hardware accelerated, which makes them useless for games.

The hardware accelerated proprietary drivers from Nvidia and ATI have given people different problems, which is really annoying because there is not likely to be a fix within a matter of days. I have to use Nvidia's less-than-latest to get stable gameplay on my Gnu/Linux machine.

ATI's Catalyst for the Radeon 8500 on my Windows 98SE system has been glitchy for some games, but check out the cool new way to access the Display Properties screen! Whoa! No more right clicking on the desktop for me!

[Tom Gilleland]

I've had customers just change their screen resolutions from 32 bit to 16 bit (or vice versa) and have it fix problems. I'd also make sure he's not having some problem with viruses/adware/spyware. The bulk of our tech support issues result from these.

Tom