Access 2003 failure

[Ferenik]

Good Day, ran into a new problem that is just causing me stress,

We have a brand new W11 Laptop the Gram from LG that works well however Cannot use Access 2003 on it, runs but cannot open or save any .MDB files, the MDB we use for our inventory backend runs fine on every other machine (including other W11 machines) but this one laptop is causing grief.

2003 is the only version I have access to, updating to 365 is not an option as my boss does not wish to change over since he's had problem with newer Office versions messing our templates up.

Had Rainmeter and NeXuS installed on it since the user wanted it to look more like a macbook but even after doing a fresh install of windows and Office 2003 still cannot get it open anything or even be able to open anything without freezing up and crashing. Any advice would be appreciated.

[#2]

Access 2003 has not been officially supported in Windows versions since Win7.

See https://www.fmsinc.com/MicrosoftAccess/history/features.htm 

The fact that you got it to work at all in Win10 or 11 should be considered as a surprising bonus.

You either need to downgrade Windows or persuade your boss that she/he has to purchase a newer version of Office

[#3]

@Ferenik 

To help with the discussion with the this boss, you might want to familiarize yourself with the concept of "Technical Debt". In a nutshell, that refers to the practice of deferring investment in technology as long as possible, until system failures occur. At that point, the cost of recovery is often larger than the costs that would have been incurred over time in incremental, but regular, updates and modernizations. Not to mention the fact that you are now in a critical situation losing productivity as well.

The corollary to that is deferred maintenance or improvements to infrastructure and equipment. That's usually easier for business people to see. They are aware that the machine in the corner was installed 37 years ago and finding parts to repair it is now nearly impossible, and finding mechanics to work on it is even harder. 

Yet somehow they don't see that the same problem exists in their software systems. Help the boss understand what is happening to you.