Updated: MAVIS – MotorTraxx by Scott Systems – on Windows 7

So I was recently doing an upgrade at a local business that uses a program called Mavis. It is made by a company by the name of Scott Systems and they seem to have it under the name MotorTraxx. This version is very old, 16 bit, and pure DOS.

Setup was as follows:

• The program files are on a network share.
• The share is mapped in by network drive.
• They run the mavis1.bat file to start the program.

I ran into a few issues from their old XP machine on the new Windows 7 machines.

1. The program (on windows 7 64 bit) would not open, threw an error about 64 bit compatibility.

To solve that, I reinstalled Windows 7 – 32 bit.

1. Next I ran into the problem of it not being able to write to a non-existent directory – something like c:\winnt\xx\xx\xx

This is because the Winnet folder does not exist anymore. What it was trying to do is update the config.nt file and change files from 40 to 200.

1.  Lastly I ran into the issue of it saying “too many open files, error code 0” in nice red letters.

This one was much harder to solve. My clue was the error above. I had to run notepad as administrator, then open c:\config.sys and change FILES=40 to FILES=200. Then I opened (from the same notepad session) c:\windows\system32\config.net and find FILES=40 and once again change it to FILES=200. After that, the program ran without a hickup.

At this point all I can do is wait and see how it works as the users use it more. Hopefully that will do the trick though.