Expert: Neal Ziring - 1/17/2004

Question
bought a new computer with win. xp home ed. and wanted to keep my old corel draw 4.0 suite. I used photopaint a lot. All programs work, corel draw, chart, mosaic, et. except for photopaint.  When I try to launch it I get the message: PntVideo.drv not found or not enough memory. The new computer has plenty of memory and I copied the PntVideo.drv file to all of the folders I thought it might need to be. Still get same messase.  Oh yes, I also tried the compatability wizard in win. xp but did not fix it. Can you help or point me in the right direction.  Corel does not offer support for 4.0 any more.  

Answer
Thomas,

Sorry, but you won't be able to use CorelDraw 4 on
Windows XP.  Details below...


Moving an application from an older version of Windows
(e.g. Win 95) to a newer one (e.g. WinXP) can be very
problematic.  There are a number of problems:

 1. You cannot be sure that the application will even
    run at all.  Sure, Microsoft tries to make sure that
    most contemporary 32-bit applications will run on
    WinXP.  Older 32-bit applications may not run, and
    16-bit applications (Win 3.1-compatible) will NOT
    run on WinXP.

 2. Even if the application can hypothetically run on
    WinXP, copying a Windows application from one machine
    to another is almost always difficult.  You would need
    to copy all the DLLs that the application installer
    originally placed in the Windows folder, as well as
    any registry keys that it might have created.  Not
    impossible, but darn difficult for an application as
    complex as CorelDraw.

Now, you saw an error message about PntVideo.drv.  That is
probably an instance of number 1.  The PntVideo.drv file
is almost certainly special a Win95 driver.  Drivers from
Win95 will NOT work on WinXP, ever.  

So, I'm sorry, but it looks like WinXP cannot support
CorelDraw 4.  You should buy a newer version like 7 or 8.
I just looked, and there were a copy of folks selling
copies of the CorelDraw 8 Suite for about $20 on EBay.
I'm sure you can find it elsewhere on the web.  Don't
bother looking for it in stores -- you'll only find
CorelDraw 10 and 11.  They're good, but expensive, usually
over $200.

Hope this helps...

...nz