Access 95 very slow in WinXP

I have a client who is running an old database application in MS Access 95. (It apparently cannot be upgraded to a newer version of Access for technical reasons).

We recently just upgraded their entire office to new Athlon machines running XP, and this legacy database application has become VERY slow - like 10 seconds to 2 minutes of hourglass time when they open a form or generate a report.

Can anyone point me in a direction to potentially help them with this problem? I am in the middle of building them a new database using SQL servers, but they need to run their legacy app in parallel for a few months and it's just totally unworkable on their new machines.

Many thanks!

 

Easiest thing first - have you tried running the app in compatibility mode and picking an OS version it liked? 98 would be a good bet.

If that doesn't work (and I really have no idea) then do you have access to one of the old systems? I'm betting that Access95 made some system setting tweaks via config.sys/autoexec.bat/*.ini that were needed to make it run properly. If you can find those, you can probably add the values to the XP system. Environment variables or the like.

Might also be worth locating the various .ini files from the older system and on a test machine, putting them all into the folder Access runs from. XP is designed to not allow stuff to 'junk up' %system% but to force the app to run the files from it's own folder while making the app think they are in the %system% folder.

Access95 - what a blast from the past.