Help Needed - can't install SK98 in Windows 7 Home Premium 3

[IanMcKean]

thread807-1571275

I had SK98 working in XP and Vista but cannot install it in Windows 7 Home Premium. I have an install file called skw98sea.exe which is 8972 kb dated 5/11/2001 23:24. I have tried all the compatibility settings but the install won't run. I also tried Internet Sidekick and that did not work either. Reading the forum it seems that a lot of people have managed to get it to work in W7. Any suggestions?
Thanks, Ian

 

[jimalex]

Hi Doug,
Your 2 major complaints really belong to another thread but with a little brainstorming there might be a permutation that would work for you.
For example, in CONTACTS the default folders are BUSINESS and PERSONAL. That does not stop you from having several new folders where you choose the name such as COMPANY XX and when you click on this all the CompanyXX cards can be put in this one folder. It's easy to move or copy cards to the COMPANYXX folder from existing folders.

Alternatively try using the SORT command. For example, for every card you want to group together mark COMMENTS with an 1A. Then sort on COMMENTS and all the 1A's will be gouped together. Using CAPITAL LETTERS allows the odd word to stand out.

I think you are right that the contacts choice does not allow much on fonts etc but you might find you can do a lot in MEMOS. You like the free entry aspect and in Memos you can paste templates and write freely in any format. What's ideal in Memos is that you can change font, do italics, and underline. You can't sort much but again you can use separate folders. Or, if you have to have it all together start your title line with 1A for all your CompanyXX cards which will at least group them together. You can separate them as there is a multiple memos procedure where a couple of clicks will isolate all the 1A's.

Brainstorming can be completely useless but I'm sure there's something there.

 

[DougSilver]

Jim--feel free to move these tangential posts to another thread.

I am still using Sidekick 2 so there are no memos but I think the Notes is probably the same. What I prefer about the Card Log in the Cardfile view is the manner in which you can keep a running chronological bunch of comments whenever you call or talk with or think about a contact. The free-form nature of the Card Log is great.

I really only have a few tabs in the Cardfile view--Existing Clients, Prospects, Technical Contacts, Building Department contacts. I never thought about creating and devoting an entire tag to a particular client or prospect but that makes sense. I still would prefer it if clicking on a company would automatically pop up all of the separate contacts within that company but I guess this is bells-and-whistles stuff that wasn't easily programmable in the days when Sidekick was ported over from the Dos version to Windows.

By the way, the current struggle I am having is with the "win16 subsystem out of resources" error. I never got this on my old computer which was running XP but I now have a newer computer at work. It is still running XP but is multi-core processor and faster. On this new machine I have been getting the win16 subsystem problem more routinely for some reason. I cannot do the win32.dll fix since the windows file protection on the network does not let me replace. I think there is a registry tweak I can do to force more handles and I might try. Last resort will be to leave Sidekick 2 and go to Sidekick 98 and see how that runs (but I really prefer the look and feel of 2).

Doug

 

[james33]

Dear Doug
If you use [Company] and the CardField: Company has 1A or whatever else in it, the title of a Quick letter in Sidekick98 will give you the Memo titled 1A or whatever and then all the memos titled that, will be grouped together but only if you choose to group/sort by title for memos in that folder.
You can increase the number of pagefiles to avoid the Win 16 out of resource error, I believe.

Regards Jim
Check the FAQ area of this Forum for answers (If there are any FAQs!) , it could save you a lot of time and effort! Good Luck!

 

[jimalex]

Hi Doug,
As you have SKW2, the only relevant comment I had was to name each folder/cardfile separately and insert the relevant cards in the cardfile. Alternatively, the master cardfile could be annotated by group in the title you sort on, such as A1 for all the A1,s.

You do remind me that I used to export to a dbf file (dBaseIV) and then I could play around with it. Dare I mention that Excel now gives this flexibility.

Mind you, take a look at Sidekick 98 Memos (which is different from SKW2 Notes) as I think it gets close to your requirement if you label a Memo File (like Note File) and have your subfiles as Memos. You then have a blank equivalent of Card Log (eg To Do) and a toolbar like Word.

I share your views on SKW2 but sadly I have never been able to install it on Windows 7 Home Premium. (It´s on Vista). I´m told that all sorts of things work on a more expensive version. I´d guess Windows 8 is no different.

System32.dll is chicken-out territory for me as is its program via the registry. I had occasion to need it but got out of it with System Restore as I had a date where everything was previously working.

 

[lgpiper]

Sorry to hijack this thread back to the original topic. ;-)

So, I've still got a small problem, albeit a small one. Following @HenryW's directions, I did get SK98 up and running on Win 7 Home Premium. But I have a consistent problem every time I start the program. When I start SK, I get a message telling me that some unknown program is trying to change things on my hard drive and do I want to allow it to do so? So, of course, I can click "yes" and all is good. But, does anyone have any ideas how to make it stop the alert messages? I've fiddled with program properties and the like, but so far haven't come up with anything useful. SK is in c:\starfish\sidekick98\programs and I launch from a short cut on the quick launch bar.

 

[lgpiper]

Ok, and now back to the hijacked thread part. Like @DougSilver, I like the feature in the contacts folder that I can have a running log of notes about various calls and so forth. According to the Evernote Bible, you can do something similar by setting up your contacts in Evernote. I think there would be no particularly good way to move your contacts to Evernote, but once there, the sorting and grouping would be relatively easy, and you can easily enough keep up a runnning activity log with each of your contacts.

Before you all helped me get SK running on Win7 HP, I was in the process of moving a bunch of my SK memos stuff over to Evernote. As I said in an earlier post, my SK memos files are in essence a documentation of my life over the past 18 or so years. My main problem with switching from SK to Evernote was that Evernote was not good for the calendar parts, which are important to me. For various reasons, I don't want to give myself over to Google's data mining enterprise, so have little interest in Google Calendar and Google Docs.

 

[DougSilver]

Hey Piper--I would have thought that installing SK98 the way that you did (in its own directory at the root level versus in the Programs directory) should have prevented the "unknown program trying to change. . . " message.

Frankly, I find Win7 to be a bit of a PITA with all of the intertwined security things that are meant to protect you. I guess that is find for inexperience users but those types of warnings consistently get in the way when you are trying to get something done. There are probably some settings or registry tweaks to turn some of that stuff off.

Doug

 

[Suegchfc]

I love you. Got it up and running on my new Win8 laptop. Now - any download ideas for Win XP - your dropbox file doesn't work for XP. Ideas anyone?

Sue

 

[jimalex]

Hey! This is becoming a one thread forum!
Sue, as you must be the first to say SK works on Windows8 why not put it in a new thread as it will get lost in here.

Now the next bit (still Sue). Dropbox definitely works with Windows XP. The only thing I know is that old and corrupt registry entries deny Dropbox access - so you could try CCleaner to clean the registry.

Alternatively, download the SK zip to Windows8 and save it. Then copy it to your machine that has the Windows XP operating system and unzip it.

 

[jimalex]

I would guess that lgpiper's "unknown program" problem (13 March 10.45) is not connected to Sidekick and would turn up elsewhere. On the basis that you are using Internet Explorer, try Tools and choose Manage add-ons. You can then see everything that should and should not be there with the facility to disable anything you do not want enabled. There is a "prevent programs from suggesting changes" box which might be worth a tick.

 

[james33]

Dear igpiper
There is another way to create a log of calls and it is not in any other program but Notepad.

If you open Notepad and enter .LOG on the first line and then save it as any name then every time that file is opened, there will be a time and date entered on the line following the last line of text entered when it was opened previously.

If you create a new field called PATH
Then you can create a folder on the root of the C:\ drive , maybe called C:\SKNotes and
if you name each file, with no gaps in the name, by the name of the firm that the person whose card you have open works for..... (Sorry about this torturous explanation!)
eg C:\Path\Companyname
you enter that path in the field you have just created, and every time you call that firm,
double click on that path,
Because there are no gaps in the name, you will have selected the entire path, press Ctrl+C
Press Winkey +R and then paste the path you have just copied into the RUN dialog text box,
Press enter and you will open the textfile of that company (time and date entered for you)
you enter the conversation and then
Close the textfile
The name/path of that textfile is the same for each person who works for that firm so....
You now have a record, timed and dated of each of the conversations you have had with that company.

HTH
Jim

Regards Jim
Check the FAQ area of this Forum for answers (If there are any FAQs!) , it could save you a lot of time and effort! Good Luck!

 

[james33]

Dear igpiper
One caveat, which I have just thought of, and that is that Notepad has a limit in size of between 45K and 54K see the following Microsoft help page:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/59578

Their solution:
WORKAROUND
Use another text editor to edit the file, well you know now how helpful they can be!

I have found the free version of notetab (notetab light) is quite useful and the .LOG trick works with it:

http://www.notetab.com/download-now.php

It also has a Replace Windows Notepad option under the Help menu and you can restore it if you are not happy.
If you need formatting etc, try another more advanced (usually slower) Notepad replacement by entering "notepad substitute windows" in google or whatever.
That is if you need greater functionality, I prefer the bare bones though Notetab Light is anything but, download it and try it out.
HTH

Regards Jim
Check the FAQ area of this Forum for answers (If there are any FAQs!) , it could save you a lot of time and effort! Good Luck!

 

[MirabiliDictu]

After following HenryW's instructions, I successfully installed SK98 on a new Win 8 64 bit laptop. However, something very strange happened next. When I tried to type in a scheduled event on the daily page, no characters would appear on the event line. Even stranger, when I tried to type in the memo section, it worked fine. Really have no idea what to do next. Any ideas??? Thank you.

 

[james33]

To try out the obvious first have you checked the font you have set to make sure it's not white?

Regards Jim
Check the FAQ area of this Forum for answers (If there are any FAQs!) , it could save you a lot of time and effort! Good Luck!

 

[gwbert]

Many thanks to HenryW & others. Have summoned up the nerve to put all my historic
data to the test on Win 8.1. Couldn't have been easier. New machine is a HP Pavilion
laptop, & the whole operation including loading 40+ large Cardfiles going back to 1996
took a whole 6 minutes.

As I like my apps in sets, I used c:\program files\home\sk86 as folder with no problems.
Copied the old data sets from Internet Sidekick into the SK98 userdata, & they worked.
Slight panic when I checked out the most recent cardfile & it was scrambled, with every field content having pushed down a couple of fields, & some off the card..... closed the file, reloaded others & they worked, so returned to the problem file & all seemed well. Not yet worked the new installation hard, but it will be use all day, every day, as it
has been for many years - I'll pass back any peculiarities that I find.

There can't be many items of software that still work exactly as you want after 18 years ..... & for which there is no better modern alternative. ('tho I also still use Ecco Pro as a truly excellent & comprehensive outliner, & that's another abandoned 15-year old+ babe kept alive by a user group. Still has all my grand business plans & strategic forecasts written as we went towards the dot-com boom'n'bust - will make a book one day!)

Colin

 

[Tmunson1]

HenryW I can't thank you enough! Got Sidekick 98 running in Win 7 Pro via your instructions without a hitch. I copied my Sidekick 2.0 Userdata folder over and all my contacts and log entries worked perfect. The calendar Multi-Day and Special Day events came over fine but for some reason none of my other events show up. Any ideas?

 

[DougSilver]

Many thanks to Jim and also Henry as I was able to get Sidekick 98 installed and working on the new Win 7-64bit computer at work. What I did was to install the program at the root level (C:\Starfish) rather than in the Programs folder. Everything seems to work fine except now I am realizing how dated and unattractive the interface looks compared with more recent programs. One thing that would be nice would be if these was some way of adding colors to all of the bright white screens and/or mixing fonts rather than having to go with a single font, etc.

Oh well--at least I can continue to keep track of my contacts.

Doug

 

[gwbert]

Hi --

After my initial euphoria, all is not well. Have realised that I cannot update any contact info on win 8.1 x64 regular. SK98 installed after a couple of glitches, & worked ok for a time... but, I have found that sometimes the cardfile is loaded in a way that shows garbled data, & more importantly, whilst I appear to make changes OK, none of them have ever been saved, even after pressing the "save" icon. I have now seem other reports of similar problems.

SK is now refusing to load, citing an obscure error message referring to citypair data.

Will uninstall & start again. I originally installed in the full Program Files folder as
suggested - will now try in the Program Files(x86) folder to see if that works.

Will notify progress later,

Colin

 

[jimalex]

Hi Colin
I got it working on C:\STARFISH\SIDEKICK 98\USERDATA.
I had to delete Henry´s idea as it gave me trouble with the Calendar.