I was always under the impression that a program written for an older version of Windows could be run by the current version. However, today, I was trying to install a program from a self-extracting zip, and it told me that it could only be installed on Windows 2000 or XP (I’ve got ME). Is there any thing I can do besides getting a different version of the program?
ME is older than XP and although it was released around about the same time as Win2K, ME is part of the Win9x family, whereas Win2K and XP are of the Windows NT lineage.
Some programs written for a specific OS won’t even try to install themselves on another (even if technically, there is no reason why they wouldn’t work on it), but in the case of many others, the differences between the OSes mean that the program simply won’t work.
The most common example of this occurs when a Win9x program won’t run on XP because it tries to access the hardware directly (which XP won’t allow to happen).
In any case, the fact that your program specifies XP along with 2000 means that it was released after ME was superseded.