CDaze Notes

Ok this make no sense why the install to Win7 Pro can not upgrade from any lesser edition of Vista.  This does not seem to violate any license issue as you can still upgrade to Pro by doing a clean install instead.  It just won’t enable the Upgrade path keeping all your settings from Vista Home.  If you bought the Windows 7 Ultimate supposedly this will do the upgrade install or if you bought the Windows 7 Home edition it will upgrade without clean install.  So why the installer prevents upgrade to Pro is just pretty inconvenient and silly.
Notice this post is more of a personal note to remind myself how to do it.  If you choose to try this method of installing the upgrade; you do so at your own risk and I assume no liability or obligation from any harm or problems caused from using this method.  If you don’t agree, stop now and choose the default install method the Windows 7 install choose for you.

Solution.  Copy your Windows 7 install DVD to USB stick or some other media that you can access from Vista.  I don’t recommend copying to the same partition of the Vista installation.  Find the file called ei.cfg in the \Sources folder.    Rename it to ei.bak, note the file is marked read only coming off DVD – change it.   Now run the setup from the copied over media location.  When the installer prompts of what version you wish to install, install the one that matches your current version of Vista, ie Home Premium.  Selecting anything else will not enable the upgrade path to be accepted and selecting Ultimate will not be activated with your Pro key.  After selecting the matching version to your Vista install, choose the upgrade path.  If it accepts the upgrade path, the install will begin copying files.  If not you will be given option to clean install – retry it with a lesser edition.  Sit back and wait the hour or so this upgrade is going to take.  When the upgrade install is complete you will be asked to enter your license key and activate, do not enter anything and uncheck activate now, continue.  This is now a 30 day trial version of the version you installed but with all your old settings.  Time to bump it up to Pro version.
Go to the control panel and look for the Upgrade Anytime option.    Run it and it will ask for the install key.  This is the key that came with your Win7 Pro DVD.  Enter your Windows 7 Pro key, it will check if the key is valid and then it prompts about downloading files for the upgrade – takes about 10 minutes to upgrade to Pro.  After it’s done it will reboot and finish the upgrade.   It will now say Windows 7 Pro, you have 30 days to activate it.  Click on the Activate from the control panel or wait until Windows ‘reminds you’ to activate.  You should now be upgraded to Win7 Pro with all your old settings from Vista.
If MS decides to prevent this method of install you will probably end up having to do a clean install all over again or calling in to fix your activation.  You might be able to roll back the upgrade back to Vista if you have a problem.  I have not had any problems.  If I do run into a problem or receive notice of license violation this post entry will be updated.  Hopefully MS will just enable an easier upgrade method.  It makes no sense of not allowing an upgrade to Pro from Home edition as an option thus forcing the user to the clean install method.  Generally I prefer a clean install to an upgrade, less problems with compatibility and the system runs more smooth but sometimes the upgrade method is needed.  Good luck.  If another method works better please let me know.
ps To prevent spam all replies are verified for approval upon being submitted. Comments are always appreciated.
Thanks – CDaze

More of operator head space and timing error.  In all the changes to the BIOS trying to fix the ATI BSOD I cleared the CMOS and pulled all the power to the system.  The system clock reset back to 2006…  Windows update does not like your PC being too much out of sync.  Update the system clock to the current time and everything should be back to normal.
One odd thing was there was no updates detected.  This was a fresh install and I know there was a few updates available.  Waited a few minutes and went directly to the Windows update through IExplorer (Saftey drop menu) and the Windows update in the control panel popped back up with all the available updates.

Installing a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit causes a BSOD blue screen of death.  This was pretty frustrating as I’ve always run in to a problem with ATI drivers.  In XP the solution for me was to run Omega ATI drivers instead.  After many changes in the BIOS (Abit AV8 board) nothing would work but changing the video driver to standard VGA in the OS (from safe mode). Tweaks tried: reserving IRQ, disabled extra devices, clock settings and bus speeds… Nothing worked.   One thing that changed while upgrading this time was I put in another 2GB of ram.  Removing the ram proved not to cause the BSOD but I want to run with 4GB of ram.  Found the solution but not sure on what causes the problem.  I noticed my board with dual sided chip drops the clock to 333 instead of 400 when using 4GB.  Could be something with this.  What fixed the problem was manually entering how much ram is available to the OS at boot time.  You can access this setting with the msconfig tool.  Boot up into safe mode or standard VGA video.  Run msconfig by typing in ‘msconfig’ from the Start Run or search prompt.  Prompts to run as Admin are ok but in safe mode it should not prompt you.   Click the Boot Tab. Now put a check mark in the Maximum memory setting and select how much memory your system uses.  It should default to how memory the system is detecting.   Mine is 4GB or 4096MB.  Apply the changes and the system will need to reboot.  If everything works, your screen should flicker instead of BSOD.  For some reason my desktop theme was blank (black), probably from the auto repair options trying to fix it.  You can change your desktop themes back to normal though if that happens…  BTW the latest Vista x64 Catalyst drivers from ATI (AMD) loaded up fine.  Good luck.

Adobe Illustrator CS3 patch fails to update to 13.0.2

I could never find a quick solution to this problem and most methods did not work. Adobe’s solution is to completely remove all of CS3 and reinstall. When that fails, run their cleaner utility and install it again… Why not just fix it??? Adobe’s patcher’s will fail if any one file being updated does not match the md5sum. This means if you had what you thought was a patched Adobe install and just one file does not match the md5 check, the whole update fails. This even includes the Illustrator CS3 Read Me.html file. Their updates also need to be updated in sequence, 13.0.1 must be installed before 13.0.2. The updater will not check against any older check sums as an alternative possibility. This was the whole reason CS updater was failing for me, some of my files were still the originals of 13.0.0. When I added options that were not installed from my initial install, the installer somehow reverted some of the patched files back to the older version from the DVD. If you attempt to re-install 13.0.1, it fails telling you it has been updated already. The whole check to tell if your system is patched is a simple xml text file. It does not verify if the files were actually patched. It just reads the xml file, finds a reference to 13.0.1 and stops. No update needed.

This is how you check if you are having the same problem. Locate the patcher log file and open it in notepad or any text reader. The easiest way to get there is to bring up your Run dialog from the Start Menu and paste this %APPDATA%\Adobe\PatcherLogs This takes you directly to the application folder in your user profile. Open up Adobe Illustrator CS3 13.0.2.log and scroll down to the current date in the log file. If you have a large log file you can simple delete the file and run the patcher again. It will create a new text file with current dates. Look for the failed entry in the log file. Mine fails on the first file as seen below. This means the md5sum of Links Panel.aip is wrong, its expecting to find the md5sum from version 13.0.1. Mine is from version 13.0.0.

Install language of the product as set by patcher: en_US

Patching file: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS3\Plug-ins\Extensions\Links Panel.aip

Patcher successfully located the file to be patched at: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS3\Plug-ins\Extensions\Links Panel.aip

Checksum before of the file as specified in Manifest XML file: 8f43623eed759b34cc98cf632ec033c1

Checksum of the file as computed from the target location: F71DF13E1158F1A2EFF92CD89BA4A475

checksum failed.

Checksum before of the file as specified in Manifest XML file: 11579373299fb29fddf4dafff0d28384

Checksum of the file as computed from the target location: F71DF13E1158F1A2EFF92CD89BA4A475

checksum failed.

Patcher was unable to verify the checksum before and checksum after of the file to be patched. Patch will fail.

File operation failed.

If you are getting basically the same error message then these steps will probably help you. Now the steps I am going to do are assuming most my files are reporting version 13.0.0. If most of yours are reporting 13.0.1 you will need to modify these steps towards extracting the files from the 13.0.1 patch instead of the install disk. Warning this may take a few minutes but should be shorter than completely stripping every reference of CS3 on your system and possibly messing up your serial activation. These steps will not touch any registry settings, license files or change anything not related to Adobe. How are we going to do this? Simple we are going to give the patcher what it wants and make it run like it should without modifying the patcher.

Things we need to have… 7Zip, Notepad or any text reader, Adobe Install Disk and Adobe patches.

7Zip is a free archive program. It is able to open and extract many different archive formats. This is not the only program that can do this but is fairly simple for what we need to do, plus its free. http://www.7-zip.org/

Notepad should be part of your OS install but if you are looking for something that does a lot more then try NotePad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

You can visit the Adobe website and download the manual patches for Illustrator 13.0.1 and 13.0.2. http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/

Now it’s time to get started. First find this file and delete or move it. {C4519961-AC64-4565-B3AF-9050296B5D5A}.patch This is the xml file that tells the patcher checks for what version is installed. If the file does not exist, the 13.0.1 patch will now tell you an update exists would you like to install it. It’s located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Installers folder.

So now try installing 13.0.1 patch. You should now get the prompt about new updates and asking to install it. Try to install the update. If it completes without any error, then consider yourself lucky and finish up with installing the 13.0.2 patch. This means all your files were actually from the install disk and the xml file was just a leftover causing the problem. If you get a generic error message then we need to go back to patcher log file to find out what files are causing the error.

I am going to use my 13.0.1 patcher log file as an example.

Install language of the product as set by patcher: en_US

Patching file: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS3\Plug-ins\Photoshop Filters\Gaussian Blur.8bf

Patcher successfully located the file to be patched at: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS3\Plug-ins\Photoshop Filters\Gaussian Blur.8bf

Checksum before of the file as specified in Manifest XML file: 82b0067317d3e1893f2fa3af8c63a784

Checksum of the file as computed from the target location: C45387A2E4777A5C88C097DFAAA1D705

checksum failed.

The patcher is looking the file Gaussian Blur.8bf, the md5sum it is expecting is 82b0067317d3e1893f2fa3af8c63a784 but what is detected on my PC is C45387A2E4777A5C88C097DFAAA1D705. If the files don’t match the patch fails.

We need to replace the current file on the PC with the one the patcher is looking for. This file is on your install DVD. It is located in a cab file Adobe CS3\payloads\AdobeIllustrator13en_US\AdobeIllustrator13en_US1.cab Your location may differ. Find this cab file and open it up with 7Zip. When opened you will see a bunch of files with md5sum values at the end of the file name. We need to make this a little easier to find the file we want. Sort them by file size and compare it the file size of the file on the PC. They will not be exact but should be close enough to find the file we need. For me the file is name is _111_82b0067317d3e1893f2fa3af8c63a784. Extract your file to the PC somewhere. Rename it to the actual file name on the PC. Backup your file on the PC and replace it with the file we just extracted and renamed. Make sure if you are backing up the original file to move it to another folder. If it’s left in the folder with a different name like .bak, Adobe will still try to load the file as a plug in. It will cause an error when starting Illustrator. Now that the file is replaced, run the patcher again. It will probably fail a few more times. For me, it took 5 files to get the patch applied. Just go back to the log file, go straight to the bottom of the log and find which file failed this time and replace it. After the 13.0.1 patch is completely installed, try installing the 13.0.2 patch. It should now pass no problems. If it still fails you can try the same steps to troubleshoot.

Hope that helps out…  — This is still in rough draft.  Will update it with some screen shots and clear up the wording.  Just wanted to get the idea out there for those looking for help on this problem.

Foxit Reader is a small free alternative program to open PDF files. It is much faster in starting and opening the PDF compared to the primary PDF reader from Adobe, Adobe Reader. One problem that I noticed with Foxit reader, it does not auto update the add-ons nor is there an update check for them. Recently while scrolling through a PDF, Foxit would crash repeatedly at the same page number. Adobe Reader would open the same page with no crash. First I just ignored the issue thinking it was a incompatible problem from not using Adobe reader or a corrupt PDF. It started becoming more frequent with other PDF files but still worked with most PDFs. I noticed the next readable page used a screen shot image embedded in the page before the crash. Way back when I first started using Foxit, certain PDF pages with images would not show up and required the free JPEG add-on. You must visit the Foxit web page and download it from their list of add-ons. The add-ons are updated from time to time to support the latest version of the Foxit Reader but they are not automatically updated after installing the latest version. To update the add-on, you must do this manually. So if you find your version of Foxit Reader crashing repeatedly check to see if any of their add-ons have been updated. In my case, the problem was the the JPEG2000/JBIG Decoder fxdecod1.dll. The crash occurred every time the PDF used embedded images but did not occur until one of those pages was reached.

The error was reported as:

FOXITR~1 caused an Access Violation (0xc0000005)
in module ntdll.dll at 001b:7c9109f9.

Solution: Close Foxit reader and update the add-on.

Get Foxit Reader

When a php page is working on the root of the domain but not in any sub directories, the permissions are wrong. Any directories that need to run php need to be set to 755.

While trying to install Mambo CMS the installation page would never come up errors with 404. The CPanel Apache Error log shows – SoftException in Application.cpp:238 “..file.php” is writeable by group. The log file points to a problem with the file but it is actually the directory. The php file should be 644. Installing Mambo from the tar/zip file the default folder permissions needs to be set. This is similar to an inherit permissions. In Linux this is set with the cmd ‘umask’. To have all new directories created with the 755 permission set as default, ‘umask 0022′. Now when a new directory is created from mkdir or new extracting an archive, all directories will have 755 permissions.

If you have Outlook Express (OE) running and find you can not delete your emails anymore chances are your mail box dbx file is corrupt or just too big.   Outlook does not by default enable empty deleted email or sent email folders.  These files can become huge over time and tend to become corrupt.  A temp work around is to try the Shift and DEL at the same time while the message is selected (not open).   This bypasses the use of the deleted mail folder.   These folders that everyone refers to are actualy hidden files on your hard drive.  Rather than doing all the steps to make explorer see where the files are here is an alternate method.
1st  Make a backup of the email you wish to keep.   Create a new folder in the root folder of OE,  just above the Inbox.  Move or Copy (prefer copy) all the email to your new folder.
2nd  Open up Explorer and make a new folder in your choice of location.  IE C:\mymailbox
3rd  From the Options menu in OE, locate the Maintenance Tab.  Select change mail folder, browse to where you created the folder and click OK.  You will get a prompt saying to need restart OE.  Restart OE.
4th  After the files move over, close OE.  Now go to the new folder you created in Explorer and look for the files with the same name as your folders from OE.  Inbox.dbx  Send.dbx etc.  Make sure the new folder name you created has a file with that name.  Remove all the other files except the one you created.  There should be nothing there you need and the files will be recreated on the start up of OE.  If you are nervous about it, move the files to a different folder instead of deleting them.
5th  Start OE.  OE should be running normal now and all the emails you could not delete should be gone.   Move your emails back to the Inbox folder if you like. 
Just to note when I had this problem the mail files were huge, 2GB and 800MB.  Remember to empty out the old mail once in a while.

As much as I like some programs to be integrated, some items just don’t seem so helpful.   What there should be is a more simple way to disable these helpful items from the program that put them there.  Such a program is the Adobe Professional ver 7 and 8.   Here are the settings to stop the PDF Maker Office Addin.   The plugin or addin is stored in the registry.  It is just a simple change of a key value “LoadBehavior” from a 3 to a 0.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\PDFMOutlook.PDFMOutlook]
“LoadBehavior”=dword:00000003 to ”LoadBehavior”=dword:00000000
You will need to change the value on all the Office programs individually.  MS Word will be here and so on.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\PDFMaker.OfficeAddin
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Access\Addins\PDFMaker.OfficeAddin
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\PDFMaker.OfficeAddin
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\MS Project\Addins\PDFMaker.OfficeAddin
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\PowerPoint\Addins\PDFMaker.OfficeAddin
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Publisher\Addins\PDFMaker.OfficeAddin
Now if you have installed one of the Adobe suites that include Contribute, you will see the entry for this plugin also.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Adobe.Contribute.OfficePlugin
Follow the same steps in all the office keys to prevent it from loading in office also. 

With the introduction of Internet Explorer 7, MicroSoft included a search bar.  It was nice of MS to offer a search bar that even allows more options than MSN for searching but they didn’t include a simple option of enable or disable it.   You would think there would be a simple right click to enable and disable just like all the other toolbar entries.  There is a simple entry to add to the registry remove it from the toolbar.   The entry below will remove the search bar for the current user, not forcing anyone else who logs on your PC with the same setting.   If you wanted it set across all the users then change the root path to HKLM instead of HKCU.  Changing the 1 to a 0 will reverse the setting.  Restart IE7 for the changes to take effect. 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Infodelivery\Restrictions]
"NoSearchBox"=dword:00000001

For this particular situation you must have SpyBot installed with immunize protection for IExplorer or some other anti-spyware program that blocks website URLs.  This shows up after MicroSoft windows update does a critical security update for IExplorer 7.  KB933566  Searching the support groups the problem is widely known but MS has yet to publish a fix.   If you have Outlook 2007 installed this is not a problem.  Guess MS wants you to upgrade to Outlook 2007 instead…
The problem starts when Outlook tries to open or create a new email message in HTML format.  If you create a new message, soon as you type a letter nothing happens for several seconds after you stop typing.  A few seconds later your letters appear.  Your CPU will be at max usage while this happens.  If you have Word installed, you can change Word to be the editor for HTML emails.  This will stop the hanging when you create a new message from Outlook but opening a new email in HTML will still hang.  Using shortcuts to send attachments will still use the Outlook for creating the new email even with Word is set for default.   Converting all your emails to text or set Outlook to read them as text will stop the hanging.
The cause is from a new security feature ‘bug’ to make Outlook check the restricted zones list for IExplorer looking for blocked URLs in the email.   SpyBot dumps a huge list of websites in the restricted zone, for some reason every letter you type Outlook is checking this list again and again.  If you have an AV program like NOD32, the IMON module is looking for these sites.  You could disable the immunize option in SpyBot.  If you are a FireFox or Opera user, they do not use that list anyway.  Make sure Outlook is not running if you make changes to remove that restricted zone list.  Oddly, it was posted you can add the list back to the zone after Outlook is running without the hangup.  Also found posts saying changing the default group to anything other than Mail or Inbox when Outlook opens can fix this, like Calendar.  Outlook 2007  does not have this problem because it does not use IExplorer’s rendering engine for HTML emails.  Setting the security zone for Outlook to use Internet zone instead of Restricted zone the problem goes away but then you are not blocking much of anything. 
I grabbed the full installer for IE7 which wipes out all the updates and patches before it re-installs IE7.  This clears out all the problems also but then you are running vulnerable to critical IE7 bugs.  I am sure there are other ways to get around the issue till/if MicroSoft fixes the problem. 

 *update*
It seems with SpyBot 1.5 this problem is no longer affecting my machines.  One noted difference, SpyBot is using hosts file for ‘bad’ website domain names.