When my old Windows XP machine failed last year, it was a painful experience--it
had Photoshop v5 on it, my real workhorse program, one that I used daily. When I
bought a (used) Windows 7 'Ultimate Edition'  (64-bit) machine to replace it, I
naturally wanted to re-install that app. (I still have the original CD disk.)  I
understood, from everything I read,  that Win7-64bit was backwards-compatible
with older 32-bit applications. Sounded simple--  I would just re-install some
older programs that I wanted to use. Yet it turned out to be anything BUT
simple. (For more experienced computer-techies, this whole process would
probably be child's play; but I had never tried doing it on Windows 7.)

SO... I tried to re-install Photoshop 5. But to my surprise and irritation the
app didn't install when using the typical automated process on the disk-- in
fact, it just sat there like a dumb brick.

Windows 7 (my 'Ultimate' edition) has a 'compatibility' mode, for switching back
to an older 'compatible Win XP' configuration (which, as far as I understood at
the time, is needed for running 32-bit apps?) I tried turning on the appropriate
features/boxes for that, re: the Photoshop disk and elsewhere...but still no
luck. Not knowing what the problem might be, I sort of gave up, and assumed
that there was some kind of problem with the installation disk , or with my CD
drive, or with Windows 7, or *something*. Over the intervening months, I tried
again to install the app, without success. (BTW, that's the definition of
'stupidity': doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different
result, ha!)

This situation was really nagging at me, so I recently decided to do some
research. The first information I came across was that Win 7's 'XP compatibility
mode' is not really *built-in* to Win 7; apparently, I first needed to download
a (free) full version of Windows XP available for this purpose from Microsoft,
and install *that* for the process to work. OK, that sounded simple enough. But
I also discovered that  'compatibilty mode' requires that my Win 7's CPU and/or
motherboard be able to run in a 'virtual PC' environment-- which, unfortunately,
it does not(!) (I downloaded a small Microsoft 'test' app to determine this,
called 'havdetectiontool'.) WHY my particular CPU doesn't do this, I don't know.
(And nothing I read about Win 7 prior to buying my replacement computer said
anything about this possible situation.) SO, once again, I was at a roadblock,
ready to give up on ever installing my old Photoshop.

But this was *really* bugging now, so I continued with more research-- and came
across some obscure info that the Photoshop disk's built-in *installer* might be
to blame for the entire problem-- that it might be a so-called 16-bit installer,
when Win 7 can only work with 32-bit installers, as I subsequently discovered.
(Apparently, Windows XP was the last version that could natively install 32-bit
apps that used 16-bit installers?) Anyway, I checked the Photoshop disk's
SETUP.exe file, and sure enough, it was an InstallShield v3.xxx *16-bit*
installer.

But one of the websites I visited had a 'replacement' 32-bit installer, free for
download. Good news, I hoped!

SO... to get this scheme to work, I extracted all the Photoshop contents/files
from the installation disk and put them in a dummy folder on my desktop-- to
completely avoid the disk's 'autorun' installation--along with the 'new'
SETUP32.exe file that I downloaded. Double-clicking on *that* instead of the
original SETUP.exe worked beautifully, and Photoshop installed without a glitch!
The process ultimately turned out to be EASY...but getting to that point wasn't
easy at all.

The moral of this story is: Never give up!

(BTW, one website I came across said that all I had to do was rename the
original SETUP.exe file as SETUP32.exe, and Photoshop would install OK. That
sounded bogus-- how does simply *renaming* the file change it from a 16-bit to a
32-bit installer?!)

I do have some un-answered questions about this entire process, though:

1) Is the successful SETUP32.exe installer --or installer 'stub', as it's
called-- a 'generic' installer (well, generic to InstallShield-configured
application disks)? Or is it *specific* for use only with that particular
Photoshop app/disk, made for it and nothing else? (The website I got it from
didn't make a distinction.) If it's 'generic', can it be used to install *other*
older 32-bit apps that happen to use InstallShield? (I haven't tried this yet.)

2) After the install, I took a look at the actual Photoshp.exe application file;
it isn't running in 'compatibilty' mode, but runs OK nevertheless.  So if a
replacement 32-bit installer allows a 32-bit program to successfully install and
run on Windows 7 (which it did), then I don't really understand the actual NEED
for running in 'compatibility' mode with a required Windows XP download, or
running in a 'virtual PC' environment at all, since neither of these were
required in my case. What other purpose(s) does compatibility mode, etc. have?

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