Windows 7 run program in dos mode

Note that if you use a 32 bit operating system, you have to make sure you are using the 32 bit versions of any Windows programs you're using not the 64 bit versions. There were problems converting 16 bit DOS stuff to the 32 bit memory addressing scheme in Vista and XP and the 64 bit versions of all Windows systems.

If you're interested in the nitty gritties this is a good explanation of how "thunking" the ability to share data between 16 and 32 bit stuff was broken in Vista and XP:. That meant that I could now use the DOS program on a machine with a modern browser, which happened to be one of the requirements for us to migrate that machine from W98SE.

I couldn't find a modern browser that runs in W98SE. Luckily for us I wrote the DOS programs we use and could change them easily. For some DOS programs the original authors aren't around anymore, so it might take some extra tweaking to make it work on W7 if it's possible at all. There's a pretty good chance there won't be a problem if you take a look at some of my tips, below.

One of the benefits of using a DOS program is that it's very quick and easy to use without a mouse. DOS programs seem to run a lot slower on W7 32 bit than they did on a W98 box. The DOS programs we use are blindingly fast on W98 machines. Not on W7, but perfectly usable. You can check it out at:. We do a lot of reading directories for new files.

We do that by doing a DIR command and reading the output into memory and massaging the results. It turns out that in Vista and above they added a line to the top section of the DIR output, which was easy to fix by throwing away 5 lines instead of 4 before we started looking for file names. They also changed the format of each line with a file name in the DIR, but that didn't matter for us. W7 often has a problem connecting to network drives from any workstation.

In the case of our machines they're involved with automating processes. I really needed the machine to boot up and connect to the network drives automatically, without my manually clicking on the disconnected drives to reconnect. I run a batch file with the net use command to reconnect the drives, but it doesn't reconnect the drives unless you wait about 20 seconds after the W7 machine starts loading stuff in the Startup Group. This is in a batchfile called reconn.

The fix is to delay reconn. Delaying Running Programs. I couldn't just drop the reconn. To fix that I bought a program called Startup Delayer the free version would also work, but won't save the configurations for testing :.

In addition to delaying the batch file to reconnect the network drives, I also had to delay any programs that use those drives from starting before reconn. Startup Delayer let me set all the programs that need to see the networked drive to run after the drives were reconnected. That really saved a lot of time and hassle! I almost had a Windows 7 32 bit machine that worked as good as W98SE!

Printing from DOS Programs. It turns out that you probably need a little help getting print statements in DOS programs to work on a network or USB printer. It might work without help, but it was a problem for us. A quick fix was a program called Printfil :. This lets you specify a local or network printer. Seems to work fine, and there are lots of options to play with. We run some reports by doing a screen print of the DOS screen. Greenshot solved that problems for us:.

This program lets you tell it to grab the Print Screen when you push that button you can tell it to use any button , and send it to a printer with a form feed. I save toner on the laser printer by telling the program to only print in black and white, and in our case inverting the colors so the blue background on the DOS screen doesn't show up in black on the printer.

It's easy to setup, free, and really handy! We need the caps lock and num lock to be set differently in different DOS screens. With the old DOS and W98 machines I simply peeked and poked memory to determine the status and set the caps and num lock. Those peeks and pokes definitely don't work on W7! I simply call a batch file from the DOS program which runs "capslock on" or "capslock off" in the batch file. Same with numlock. Running this program is a lot slower than the pokes, but it works for us.

We leave the DOS program open all the time on the W7 desktop in the upper left corner. Copy the program that produced the error onto the USB drive as well. Once the operation is completed, restart the computer with the USB drive inserted. This will boot the computer into DOS. Run the software that is giving the error message from the command line.

Another potential solution is to emulate a DOS installation process. To do this, first download a copy of DOSBox, and install the program. Copy the program that is giving the error code into the installation directory for the DOSBox program. Once the software is copied to the correct location, run the DOSBox program. A DOS window should appear.