I have a client who has legacy systems running on and old dos based paradox platform. The system runs under DOS and requires 600k of Ram.

Recent windows updates on XP and Windows 7 have been causing the available memory to drop below 600k.

There are some financial implications to doing a complete upgrade away from the DOS based systems to windows. The consultant for the legacy apps is saying that we should have all XP machines. I don't see that as being viable for a number of reasons

- Incompatibility with modern apps such as office.
- Security issues due to the end of life of XP

I tried running XP in a virtual box on a win 7 pro 64 bit system. That never worked right because of the interactions with the legacy systems and peripherals. I have gotten things to work after a fashion by using 32 bit versions of Win 7,

My advice is that trying to remain on Win XP would be a disaster. This particular industry is subject to a number of federal and state regs and laws regarding privacy. I'm just trying to double check if there is any other alternative. I was thinking of some type of citrix server to show the legacy apps in a terminal window but that seems like it would be difficult to implement.

The alternative I'm proposing is to try to migrate individual components of the system one at a time. That way, we will take one piece of functionality at a time and bring it into the 21st century.

Thanks for any thoughts/ideas on this

chris