Heritage DVDs and Windows 7

I'm finally running out of Windows XP machines to run my Heritage DVDs on - they don't work with Windows 7, even in "compatibility mode".

I checked the Heritage Motors website to see if there was some sort of updated version, but they have a notice that they are no longer selling the DVDs because their supplier was "unable to resolve technical issues".

So, unless something pans out soon, we will be without our DVD fiches. The actual files are encrypted PDFs - and it would require (at least in the U.S.) violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Law to try to defeat it (maybe they would let you work on your cars in the prison shop).

Has anyone found a way to execute the DVDs on Vista or Win7?

Probably your best bet is to run WinXP under a virtual machine. If you've got Win7 Pro or Ultimate you have the capability built in in the form of "WinXP mode'. If not then you can download the free version of VMWare http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_server/2_0 and once setup you can install WinXP as a virtual machine. Hopefully you have a copy of XP around and you can figure out how to worry about a license (or not) as the case may be. It still has to be activated and patched just like a real OS install. Works quite well.

Hardest thing I had to figure out with VMWare was it comes up with a login prompt and you never created any accounts. Took me a while to figure you you just use the user name and password that you login to Vista or Win7 with - it uses the standard Windows credentials which is not very clear.

Hopefully that'll buy some time. Only alternative would be to print everything to hard copy and scan back as PDFs or something.

Simon

There's another option; Linux and WINE (a compatibility layer for win32). WINE mimics older versions of Windows quite well. I've used it more than once in a hosted environment so that users could access outdated NT 3.51 and Windows 95 software from more modern versions of Windows.

If you're interested and need help, poke at me.

Terry, if there's a way to achieve your goal, don't worry about copy rites. Your only doing it for yourself, not for resale. Who's to know!

Thanks for the suggestions. The original program was quite fussy - even on XP. If you look at the label it was made for Win98 (yech). I have and can load the XP subsystem on Windows 7 - but this is sure a lot of work to look at a PDF. You would think if the manufacturer wasn't going to support the product they would have the decency to give out the PDF password (which I assume is all that it needs). I'm not impressed.