Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

My wife had this piece of legacy software from 2006 — MGI Photosuite 8 — that she wanted to run on her Windows 7 machine. The problem was that the first time I installed it on that machine, it crashed it hard. I had to reboot in the safe mode and do a system restore. It was ugly. And the problem, it said, was incompatible drivers. That was years ago when Windows 7 was brand new. I never tried again. I simply installed an old version of XP on a Linux box in the corner for her to use. But then that system had problems, so now what?

I read about others installing legacy software and saying they had no problem so I thought I’d man-up and give it another shot, naturally running the install program in the XP SP3 compatibility mode and setting the application to run in the same mode.

Here’s what was different this time: Windows 7 spoke up and said, “Hey — those drivers aren’t digitally signed. I will NOT install them.” And it didn’t. SOLVED! That was not a problem for me since my wife does not use the program for anything, except printing photos.

Kudos to MS for flagging the drivers and preventing their installation. I don’t believe that was even an option when I first tried installing the application. Windows update must have changed the flagging, and thereby fixed it.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2014 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.