From the course: Complete Guide to Supporting and Troubleshooting Windows 11 for Admins by Microsoft Press

Troubleshooting app compatibility

- [Instructor] Most applications designed to work for Windows 7 will work with Windows 11. However, if you experience problems with Application Compatibility, check for application updates. These are usually free and fairly easy to install. If you can't find an appropriate update or an update doesn't solve your problem, then consider upgrading to more recent version of the application, which may be designed to work with Windows 11. If you can't do either of those things or neither of them are successful, then consider creating a compatibility fix. This is part of the application tools, which themselves, are part of Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit, or Windows ADK, which we've mentioned, are numerous occasions throughout the course. Generally speaking, this is a tool that you might have considered using when Windows Vista first came out, about 10 years or more ago now, about 15 years ago perhaps, and that was a significant operating system change from earlier versions of Windows like XP. So it's not the sort of thing normally that you'd encounter. I think there was a bit of Application Compatibility going on when organizations made the move to Windows 7, but as I said, anything that works with Windows 7 is quite likely to work with no issues with Windows 11. If you can't fix the application or update it or upgrade it and you still need it, then you might need to build a virtual machine running the application's preferred operating system, maybe XP, or Windows 7, or whatever it is. So, you can build that environment, install the application onto the virtual machine, and your user can still access the application that they need to use perhaps because it's a critical application for their line of business. The Compatibility Administrator tool runs in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode, depending on what you want to do, and enables you to go through a guided process to see what it is that you need to do with the operating system to have the application imagine that it's running in its preferred context. So you can see from the screenshot here that we're going back and looking at very early versions of Windows. So it really is a tool that was designed at a point in time. I'm not convinced of its usefulness now. The following high-level procedure could be followed to help you fix an application if you need to use an application fix with a Compatibility Administrator. First of all, build a Windows 11 computer that you can use as a sort of a representative image of what it is you have in your organization. Install all of the required applications on that device. Run the applications to determine if there are any problems. With bit of luck, everything will work perfectly, and you can move on to the next step of your migration project to Windows 11. But if you get any problems, install the Application Compatibility tools. Open Compatibility Administrator. Create a custom database, that's simply a question of saying new database, which I'll show you in a moment. Create a new application fix. That requires you to run the various features of the application and until it generates errors, and then applying fixes from various lists until the errors go away, and then you'll have fixed the application. So, once you've finished that series of standard tasks, and you should probably communicate with the user's department about what those tasks might be, you can then save the application compatibility fix file, which has a .sdb extension. Apply this fix file to the application within your organization. Now, you could do it on an individual computer by just applying it locally using a tool called sdbinst.exe and then the name of the fix file. You could, of course, script that to run on multiple computers, and you can use Intune or Group Policy to deploy that script. In demonstration, you'll learn how to generate an application compatibility fix file. Okay, on my standalone machine here, I'm going to load up the compatibility administrator from the Start menu. I've already installed it from the Windows ADK. And then I need to create a new application fix database, Create New, Application Fix, and I'm going to call this Windows Mail fix. It's a Microsoft software, and I browse and locate the application. Here we go, Windows Mail, and next. Now, it may be that I know that the application will run perfectly if it's on an earlier version of Windows. So I can select it from the list. You can see that the most recent version of Windows is pretty old. Windows Vista, and let's think... We're talking about 2007, '08, '09, something like that. It's a long time ago, but let's just choose Windows XP, and then we choose maybe some additional options. I'm not going to go through what all of these mean. You'll just have to figure out which ones you need by doing a bit of research online if you have a particular application. So maybe we need to run as administrator, for example, and then we can do a test run here to see how it works. Are there any command-line tools I need? I click OK, I see if the application functions, okay, this is just going to my contacts list, so it's not exactly exciting or anything. Yes, that seems to be working okay, so then I proceed here and choose some additional options. Again, you'll only really know what options to select by doing some research, you know, follow where others have been, and I can select any of these that I might need. And then again, I can do another test run. And then when I'm finished with this process, I can click Finish. The next thing I need to do is to save that away, and apply it, and we'll call this one... Let's see, WABFIX. Now, I can create my SDB file. I'm going to put it into... Well, I'll put it into the same folder, actually. Program Files, Windows Mail, why not? WABFIX. And I can now close down the Compatibility Administrator, and if I want to apply the fix to that particular executable, I don't need to really worry about where the executable is. Although actually, of course, it's been put into a fairly logical place, Program Files, and he says not being able to remember Windows Mail, there we are. So there's the WAB file and there's the WABFIX, but they don't need to be in the same place. If I take that from here and I put it into the Downloads folder, for example, that's fine. And then to apply it, I drop to the Command Prompt. I can do that by using PowerShell, or the Command Prompt doesn't make any difference, really. As you will remember, Command Prompt tools will run in PowerShell, not necessarily the other way around, though. So if I change into the Downloads folder, there's my fix. So now, I do sdbinst and then WABFIX, it's not case-sensitive, I'm just being tidy. sdb, it now applies to fix, and now my program has been fixed to run in the particular mode that I wanted it to run in. And there's not a lot of future in testing it here because it's not really doing very much. But that's the end-to-end process. As I said, most likely outcome of something not working properly is that you have to replace the app or run it in the context of a virtual machine. I think using the Compatibility Administrator is not something you're likely to come across, but it's something that I felt you should be aware of. In the demonstration, you learned how to generate an application compatibility fix file.

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