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Sometimes, it’s easy to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of a piece of software. Other times, you may have a lot of trouble. That’s the fun of working with software. Microsoft rolls up a whole bunch of patches and bug fixes, and throw them out there. Those are called service packs, of course. Windows XP is on service pack 3 currently. Louis from the PCPitStop community wrote in to ask about a compatibility issue with XP SP3. He says he never had these issues when he was still using SP2, and wonders what he can do to fix it – such as diagnostics of some sort.

Sometimes, when you install a new service pack, something will break. It’s bound to happen. Instead of rolling back to an older service pack (you can do that through the uninstall tool if you absolutely HAVE to). Locate the executable file (program) that is having the issue. You can browse/search for it via XP search tool that is built in… or right click the icon in the start menu, and select properties.

This is how you’re going to address the problem. Keep in mind, you can only do this on an .exe file. Once you locate the .exe, right click it and then go to the compatibility tab. In there, the first option you’ll see is “run this program in compatibility mode”. One of those modes happens to be Windows XP SP2. Try that one first. It’s very possible that will solve the problem. It’s worked for me before! It really can help save the day.

The good news is that with Windows 7, they’ve done things very differently. They are building in XP compatibility mode right within Windows 7. They basically remote into the application. It’ll be like it’s running within XP, instead of Windows 7. That should fix most of the compatibility issues that you may encounter with older programs.

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Having Problems on Windows XP SP3