Installing the Trial Version On vista

Question

I cannot get the trial version to install on vista..
What should I be doing to get it to work..?
Thx.

Answer 1

'Fraid not.
Your best bet is either to "Downgrade" your VISTA system to XP  or install XP (or even windows 2000) as a Virtual Machine.
If you decide to "downgrade" your system to XP again ensure you have the correct Disk drivers before you start as newer machines (and laptops) will have SATA controllers so Windows XP install will give you a message "No Hard disks found". You can load the driver by pressing F6 at Windows Install Time  but only if you have a floppy drive.
You'll get a message like please press F6 if you want to add a Storage controller. You'll then get prompted to insert the floppy disk containing the driver.
Too Bad if you haven't got a floppy drive.
On some machines a USB floppy drive will work but why go and buy a piece of obsolete hardware when you don't need to).
The only way round this problem if you don't have a floppy drive is to "Slipstream" the SATA drivers on to a Windows XP CD. This will then load the correct drivers without prompting for a floppy disk.
How to do this is beyond the scope of this post but Googling for "Slipstreaming Windows" will find you the answer.
You can get FREE software for creating Virtual machines either at http://www.virtualbox.org or download the vmware server from the vmware site.
The Abap Trial version works  quite well on a 512KB Virtual machine running Windows XP.
Incidentally OT but I think VISTA is a real pile of dog poo. I've gone back to W2K3 server. A much better product all round IMO even on a laptop.
(You can usually pick up a student edition of W2K3 server Standard Edition somewhere at low or zero cost so it's a better and cheaper bet than Windows XP Pro).
You can make W2K3 server "work station friendly" including installing acceleration, multi-media, games, themes etc quite easily by following the instructions at this link
http://win2k3.msfn.org/
Cheers.
jimbo