In this section:
· Running P3 under Microsoft Windows XP
You must have Primavera P3 installed on your PC before you can connect to it. Primavera P3 is normally installed in the directory C:\P3WIN but can be installed in any directory. Weavecentrix Desktop is not affected by the location of the Primavera P3 installation.
Normally, people will only have a single P3 license installed on their PC. This means that only one person can login to P3 at one time. This applies to Weavecentrix Desktop as well.
Hence, if you only have a single P3 license installed on your PC, you cannot have Primavera P3 open and log in to P3 via Weavecentrix Desktop at the same time.
If you get a license error, close down Primavera P3 before attempting to log in to Primavera P3 via Weavecentrix Desktop.
Primavera P3 was originally written to run under Microsoft Windows 3.1 and, like all applications from that time, it is a 16-bit application. The later versions of Microsoft Windows, including Microsoft Windows XP, are set up for 32–bit applications. This is called their native mode. To be able to run 16-bit applications like Primavera P3, they have to run a special 16-bit emulator.
All of this is usually transparent to the person running Primavera P3. The only noticeable side effect is that when you have a large number of windows open on your PC. To see this effect, open Primavera P3, open Primavera P3’s help screen and then open a few browser windows until the icons on the task bar start to compress.
When you do this, the Primavera P3 windows compress down as shown below.
This is because they are both running under the 16-bit emulator known as the NT Virtual DOS Machine. It is also know as the WOW processor. WOW stands for Windows on Windows, referring to the fact that it is emulating Microsoft Windows 3.1 under a Microsoft Windows 32 environment like NT, XP or Windows 2000.
Because the system is multitasked, 16-bit Microsoft Windows applications cannot crash Microsoft Windows XP. However, 16-bit applications within a Win16 subsystem run the exact same way as they do on a DOS/Win 3.x machine. Therefore, 16-bit apps within the subsystem can crash one another or the subsystem.
The impact of this is that Primavera P3 may not start or it can appear to lock up. Although this will not crash your machine, it will seriously degrade the performance. Under these circumstances, you should reboot your machine as soon as practicable.
Weavecentrix Desktop does not use the NTVDM or WOW subsystems but, if your have problems with Primavera P3, Weavecentrix Desktop will be impacted like all your other applications.