Going back in time???

[franksmith]

Good morning.

I've been using MS's VM machine in the past to run a particular program that does not support any system dates past 2005.

If it detects that Windows (98) has run at any stage past that date, it simply refuses to run again - at all!!! Thus I have to every time set back my system clock. If I forget, I would hvae to re-install the operating system and software.


I've seen the infor on Parallels and it looks awesome. My question is just this:
Can I change a setting when I install/configure my virtual machine that will keep the date of the VM fixed forever, even if it is different from the host pc date?

I look forward to switching to Parallels as soon as I can fix this problem.

Thank you.

Frank

[jbh001]

I'm not exactly sure about keeping it fixed forever, but you can easily make a backup of the VM to revert back to when necessary. This might also require that you save your data to a disk location outside the VM.

I would think that you could write a simple batch program that runs at start-up that resets the date and time.

The batch file only needs two lines:
DATE 01/01/04
TIME 00:00

In this example, this sets the date & time to midnight, January 01, 2004. Feel free to substitute whatever date and time suit your fancy and also lets your application run.

You can create the batch file using Notepad; just save it or rename it so that it has a .bat ending instead of a .txt ending.

This would take the place of step 2 here (http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=68655#post68655). I think that Windows 98 still uses an AUTOEXEC.BAT file. If so, you might instead open that up in Notepad and add the TIME and DATE functions above to it to see if that works.

At any rate, you'd definitely want to turn off the system clock synchronization feature in Parallels Tools, as well as any tools or services in Windows 98 that go out searching for the correct date and time and automatically set it.

By the way, is the date sensitive program a custom application? If not, out of curiosity, what program is it?