[alanturner81]

I have an ancient computer running a Microsoft Access reservations programme on Windows 98. I think the computer is about to die and is probably beyond economical repair so how easy/difficult would it be to export the programme to a newer computer running Windows XP.Would it be possible to just plug the hard drive into a newer computer or would the XP not recognise any of the 98 Access programme.
Any advice or help would be much appreciated. Alan

[zerocool]

You could plug the harddrive into a new computer running windows xp but you would need to set the hard drive you are going to plug into the computer as a slave drive, if the windows xp computer has access already installed and is a newer version then it should be backwards compatible and run the database with no problems. If you decide to copy the database you will need to make sure you copy all the componets related to the database (if it is a inter-relational database)

[alanturner81]

Thanks very much, I will give it a bash. Fingers crossed.

[spot]

There are several words in your question. Microsoft Access reservations programme. The program will probably be written in either Visual Basic (if it's a .exe) or in Visual Basic For Applications (if they have .ma* suffixes) and yes, that will be runnable from a new computer which has Microsoft Access on it. The same's true for the Microsoft Access Database files you have - the bits with the .mdb suffix.

What you can't do, though, is run Microsoft Access itself if you've not installed it on your new computer. You need the Microsoft Office install CD that you used on the first computer or you need a newer version. Just pointing at the slave drive and double-clicking MSACCESS.EXE isn't going to get you what you're hoping for.

Do you have the CD? Do you want to describe your program in more detail - maybe it just uses an Access database but it doesn't need Access installing, it depends on where it came from. What do you run on the Windows 98 machine to get the system up on your screen?

What sort of backup have you already taken of the old machine's files which you don't want to lose?