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Vista Compatibility Issues and Tips

The current version 3.0 of The Encyclopedia of North American Weeds was created well before the release of Windows Vista. Version 3 will run on the 32-bit version of Vista, but there are several issues that affect its performance and appearance. The following tips will improve performance on Vista until we release the next version of the DVD in the fall of 2008.

Issue 1: You must run the program with Administrator rights. Refer to your Windows documentation or Help, or contact your network administrator to enable the program to run with administrator rights.Without administrator rights you may get a dialog box that tells you there is not enough memory to run the program. This is not correct and is actually an indication that you do not have adminstrative rights.

Issue 2: Microsoft's Vista user interface uses more pixels for the window 'frames' than earlier versions of Windows. This causes the Weed DVD program main window to be slightly clipped off with scroll bars. You can still see most of the program window, but it can be irritating. The only way to fix this is to change the Theme settings from "Vista" to "Windows Classic". You can find the setting in Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization > Theme and select "Windows Classic" in the pull-down scroll box. This will return your Windows interface to the style used in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Issue 3: Us the default DPI scaling of 96 dpi. If you change your graphics display preferences to 120 dpi (larger scale) some of the popup windows and dialog boxes will not display properly. This setting can also be found in the Appearance and Personalization > Personalization section of the Control Panel.

All of these issues (and 64-bit compatibility) will be addressed in the next version of the DVD.