Hi. I work for a scale company, and we sell a truck weighing software called PC210. It is a MS-DOS based program which ran fine under 95/98, but not under Windows XP. There are two main problems that are happening: 1) The computer is linked to a weight indicator via the serial port (COM port 1). This feeds the weight to PC210, which is used to print scale tickets. PC210 initializes this com port open opening. Everytime we try to open the program, we receive the following message: "16-Bit MS-DOS Subsystem PC210 Weighing Program The system cannot open COM1 port requested by the application. Choose 'close' to terminate the application." Could there be another program that is trying to use that com port? I have discovered that if I unplug the serial cable, open the program, and then plug it back in, we can run the program just fine. Strange. This only occurs on our customer's computer, which is a new HP Pavilion 511n (I think). I brought my personal computer from home today, which is a Dell 4300S, and I can not reproduce this error on my pc unless I try to open PC210 when it's already open. 2) PC210 keeps up with the time to print on scale tickets. If PC210 is minimized, it will not keep up with the time. If I minimize it at 10:00, go play a game or just leave it minimized until, say 10:15, when I go back to PC210, the time is still 10:00. If I leave it active it will start incrementing the time, but it will not change to the correct time. We've tried changing the settings for idle sensitivity and such under properties, but no results. This occurs on both the HP and Dell computers. We're tried talking with technical support on PC210, however the solution they offer is that we should use Windows 95/98. But you can't buy a computer with that on there unless you have one custom built. We did that initially for our customer, and that computer was a lemon. 6 months old and a memory chip and the motherboard gone bad. We replaced it with the HP, and we're having these quirky little problems. I would appreciate any suggestions that anyone might have. Thanks, Amy Brown

Just a thought, have you tried compatability mode?

Yes, I've tried running it in the Windows 95 and 98 compatibility modes to no avail. Thanks, Amy Brown

win XP does not use ms/dos or 16 bit any longer.

You might want to set up a dual boot system on your computer with Windows 98 and Windows XP. I did it on my computer because I have two different software programs that I like but that will not run properly on XP. They are not used often so once or twice a day, I reboot to Windows 98, use them and then reboot again to Windows XP when ready. It is fairly easy to set up such a system.

This might be a really stupid question ( I'm not a programmer) but would it be so hard to recompile this program so that it worked in a modern system?