How fast is Flexquest?
Speed is not the issue, with Flexquest. It was built a long time ago, for old, slow hardware. It is plenty fast on modern hardware. The issue is how to get it working.
The company (Smart Machines, a/k/a Interaction Dynamics, of Hawaii) is long gone, and the FlexQuest product is long discontinued. The flexquest.com web site is gone, too, but archive.org has copies of most of the pages:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090404074617/http://www.flexquest.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20090406042900/http://www.flexquest.com/about_us.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20090406041338/http://www.flexquest.com/Flexquest.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20090406053659/http://www.flexquest.com/FAQ.htm
etc.
I couldn’t find the program author, who I think is named Gerald T. Glynn, either. But I got FlexQuest running on Windows 10 anyhow. Here’s how I got it working. (These instructions are from memory, a couple of days later, so I might have botched the folder names slightly.)
Step 1. Copy the entire SmartMachines folder from the “Program Files” folder on your old Windows XP computer onto a thumb drive.
Step 2. Copy the SmartMachines folder from the thumb drive into the “Program Files” folder (not the “Program Files (x86)” folder!) on your new Windows 10 computer.
Step 3. Look in the C:\Program Files\SmartMachines\FlexQuest\Program\ folder for the fx.exe file. Right-click it -> Properties -> Compatibility, and change the compatibility settings to Windows XP (SP2) or Windows XP (SP3). (Either one seems to work okay.) If there’s any chance that a different Windows User login will use the program, then use the “Change settings for all users” button to ensure that it runs in XP compatibility mode for all users.
Step 4. Using the right mouse button, click-and-hold the fx.exe file, and drag it to the Desktop. Release the right mouse button, and left-click “Create shortcuts here,” to create a shortcut on the desktop for running the program. Optionally rename it to something friendlier, like “FlexQuest.”
Step 5. Optionally copy the shortcut from the Desktop into the “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\” folder, to make the FlexQuest program available in the Windows 10 Apps list.
Note: This version of FlexQuest uses & apparently includes the needed runtimes for Visual FoxPro 8.0.
Remarkably, FlexQuest worked without any “setup” process to create registry entries, etc.
One minor glitch is that we couldn’t seem to select a printer from within the program. The workaround is to exit FlexQuest, change the Default Printer in the “Devices and Printers” folder in Control Panel, and then restart FlexQuest.
Another minor glitch is that when exiting FlexQuest you might see an error message: “This program might not have installed correctly.” It doesn’t seem to hurt anything, so you can either click “This program installed correctly” or else just close the error message. (I think it’s a side-effect of running the program without going through an installation process.)
If you need to talk to me about this, google “Geeks Alive! Computer Rescue” and give me a call.
Very fast! For example, we have run Flexquest up to well over a million records and it still can retrieve any donor’s entire record within a fraction of a second. And, some of our users report doing complex automated functions in minutes that literally took them hours on other systems, even on mini-computer systems. However, the speed of Flexquest depends heavily on the amount of memory in your computer, with memory size being of more importance even than processor speed. Incidentally, Flexquest’s superior speed has been achieved by optimizing virtually every routine to take advantage of Microsoft’s unique and proprietary FoxPro Rushmore technology.
