Relative Performance (2K / XP)

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I have the opportunity at the moment to develop a new DB in either Access 2K or Access XP and I was wondering if there are any major differences performance-wise between the two versions. I’ve done a fair bit of development in 2K, plenty in 97, but I’ve not really seen XP so far; that said, if there were good performance reasons to use Access XP over 2K I would, otherwise I’ll probably stick to 2K.

In case it helps, the databases will have the front-end / back-end split (both parts in Access) and the DB will only be used at any one time by a single user, although there will be at least three separate and unconnected copies of the system each with their own data. Despite there initially only being three users, the system will have to run under Win 2K Professional, Win ME and Win XP! Don’t ask!

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I don’t think performance is significantly better in Access 2002 (if at all). Access 2002 has a few new features, such as pivot tables and pivot charts, and more XML support (ha ha); if you need those, go for XP, otherwise it’s not really necessary, I think. The default database format in Access 2002 is still the Access 2000 format, so even if you stick with Access 2000 now, migrating to 2002 later on shouldn’t be hard.

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Acc2002 also has some enhanced printer control capabilities that you might want to check-out.

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A2002 has the Printer object and PrtDevMode and PrtDevName objects, but they have limitations, so we still use API calls to manipulate printers in XP.

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I’ve had little experience working with XP so far, as I only have one client that has it. Of course, it had it’s own quirks I haven’t figured out. Such as a report that would print in color if sent to the default printer, but would not print in color if that same printer was specified by name!

I did have a way of handling printer selection by manipulating the default printer entry in Win.ini (it was clumsy, but it worked). But this apparently doesn’t work under XP.

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The PrtDevNames method will at least give you the available printers, but we had developed code for earlier versions and we’ve found it’s still more reliable than the new objects.

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And given the mix of A2000 and A2002 machines that can be using the same database, you code solution is probably the best right now.

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