Running XP's Solitaire in Vista
It might be ugly but it is a lot faster.
Considering the lower performance of Vista's games for power-players, I'm taking a look at how to grab older versions from an existing XP installation and get them working on Vista.
A while ago I wrote how Vista's version of Solitaire is much slower than XP's in terms of how long it takes you to complete a game. For most people this isn't an issue but for those of us who are speed freaks, playing the XP versions really is a much more enjoyable experience.
Luckily though, it's very possible to play the XP versions of all the games, just by following some basic trial and erroring. You need access to an XP machine or, better yet, a XP virtual machine on your computer and head into it's %windir%\system32 folder.
Grab the executable of choice (in this case sol.exe) and hoike it back over to Vista — just dump it on the desktop for now — and try running it. You should get a Window like this:
So back to XP Land. Head back into the system32 folder and grab the dll. When you get back to Vista make sure you put it in the same directory where you put sol.exe... If you did as I said before, you should be copying to the desktop. Run sol.exe again and:
You should be able to replicate this for all XP's games as there's nothing that would stop them running on Vista... You just need to make sure that you grab all the relevant files and also that you put them in the right place in Vista. For the mostpart this just mean putting them in the same directory.
Once you've got it running from the desktop, and you're sure you have all the files, dump the directory somewhere in the system and create a shortcut out to the executable. It might be worth making a new Program Files directory for XP games.
If you've got any problems, leave a comment and I'll investigate.
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