subject: Great Plains Dos Support Case And Faq [print this page] Great Plains Accounting was popular in earlier and mid 1990th and later on it was mostly replaced by Dynamics. There is still cluster of customer running GPA for Dos, Windows and Mac. We would like to share with you the story which happened recently. Feel free to call or email us if you have issues with this legacy application as we are one of the few companies still supporting GPA. Lets go to the story and then we answer popular questions:
Symptoms. IT installed created shortcut on XP 32 bit computers to call the code from the server. This is how they were doing that since mid 1990th. Employees were able to enter documents and save them. But when they tried to post GL batch they got strange error message: Runtime error 200 Option is not available. This was strange as exactly the same configuration did work on Windows 95 computer which died couple of weeks ago
Fix. Having GPA knowledge base in Excel format we found Runtime error 200 and it was associated with CPU. Basically newer CPUs were running faster and application code was optimized for older processors. Problem was known for original installation diskettes of version 8.2 and 7.1. Later on Great Plains Software/Microsoft recompiled installation diskettes and distributed to customers around 1999. And here is the fix: moslo.info website indicated that they knew the problem when old DOS programs fail on new computers. And they got program which slowdowns performance for DOS application
Lets now take few questions and answer them:
Q. Is Great Plains DOS still supported? When we called Microsoft partners they typically answer that they do not support it as nobody knows it in their consulting team
A. To our information there is couple of companies here in the United States supporting it and one of them is Alba Spectrum
Q. From time to time we are getting one or another table corrupted. In the past we had IT folk who knew the procedure to fix. But he is gone and we need to get one of the files fixed
A. In each module you have Utilities section with option Rebuild Files. This option exports records from Btrieve table, rebuilds it and import all records back dropping corrupted ones. In most cases it fixes the problem. However there are situations when you have to replace file taking the same one from Lesson company. This method works where corrupt file is so-called work table and it has only few documents in it
Q. Is it possible to export historical Sales Orders from the system? We tried it in Pervasive SQL Control Center and export was broken every time
A. Yes it is possible. Try precise SQL Select statement and specify only fields that you need
Q. We were not able to connect to GPA database via ODBC. Do you have the clue?
A. Yes you need DDF files in order to connect via ODBC. In our opinion best connection job could be done in Pervasive SQL Control Center but you can also try Microsoft Access. Find Field, Index and File DDF files and copy them to the root directory of the company. Then create database in Pervasive. You will be instructed by Control Center
For additional information, please feel free to call us 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918 (this number works for international customers) or email us help@albaspectrum.com We serve you USA/Canada nationwide via remote support (web sessions and phone/Skype conferences). Local service is available in Western Michigan, Chicagoland, Southern California (LA, Orange County and San Diego) and Houston area of the state of Texas
