Office 2010 will not install or upgrade Office 2007

I have been trying to install the retail version of Office 2010 Pro Plus (32 bit) to upgrade an existing Office 2007 (32 bit) installation. On starting the install I get the error:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of Microsoft Office 2010.  You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated technologies.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

This is even though I never had a 2010 beta on the machine. The culprit in my situation was Outlook Hotmail Connector Addin. Running the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 ) just to list the components showed that Office components were all v12 but the Outlook Connector was v14. Uninstalled the connector and Office 2010 installed fine. After the install of Office 2010 on first use of Outlook recognised there was a need for an Outlook Connector and offered to download it by taking you to the correct download page – but you need to manually install it.

It is a pity that the install did not tell you what needed to be removed or actually upgraded it for you as it is all Microsoft software – a bit of non joined up thinking. Many people will not know what to uninstall.

Office 2010 definitely seems quicker and slicker and is probably worth the upgrade.

KIS detects change in security as new network

Recently upgraded a wireless network security from WEP to WPA. This went fine and the machines could still access the Internet etc. However later it was realised that the wireless connected computers could not longer communicate with the wired computers on network. This was traced to Kaspersky Internet Security on the wireless computers. Even though the SSID of the wireless network had not changed (and previously set to local network for the firewall) KIS had detected the change in security as a new network this had been added and the default for all new networks was Public – hence the problem. Two networks with the same SSID showed in KIS settings – one disconnected and Local and one connected and public. Deleted the old disconnected one and change the new one to Local and all works fine.

Fix PDF Previewer in Windows x64 Outlook or Explorer

PDF Preview (Outlook and Explorer) should work in Windows 7 with Adobe Reader installed (this contains preview handler). However due to the broken (for 2 years) Adobe installer not inserting correct registry key it does now work in 64 bit version. There is a very simple tweak (download .reg file and click it) to make it work.

Full details are at http://www.pretentiousname.com/adobe_pdf_x64_fix/index.html

Copying large files to USB in Windows 7 and Teracopy

I have various 15GB files copied to the old portable USB HD. Microsoft spend billions on Windows 7 and still have not sorted some of the basic file copy issues. Better than Vista but still falls over in some situation. With a particular drive formatted at exFAT (for large USB flash) it would not copy 15GB file. It locked out the PC – it actually slowed a Core7 machine with 8GB RAM to such an extent that it looked locked out (this has been described) - pull out USB cable and all jumps back to life. The 5GB file with odd {} name would only copy at << 1Mb/s - whereas a larger 7GB file did copy. Changing the name {} did not make any difference. Anyway installed Teracopy 2.01 which I have used for years and was meant to be redundant in W7 and can copy all at 20MB/s and not locked out the USB drive. Definitely install Teracopy for Win7 - why did not Microsoft just purchase Teracopy technology - saved their budget and better performance.

NetBeans, JRuby, Rail, SQLite

Looking at NetBeans IDE for Ruby on Rails Development. Trying to use SQLite as an easy way to evaluate RoR it but driver is not present by default. This is a link how to add driver support and the databases can then be managed from within NetBeans IDE.

The Firefox plug-in for SQLite Manager is another excellent way to have GUI for SQLite (search to add plugin)

Vista (64bit) to Windows 7 (64bit) Upgrade

Well I have now completed and overall it has gone reasonably smoothly although you do need to allow yourself quite a bit of time to sort out the various "small tweaks" required. The following are a few points that may e of help.

• The Upgrade Advisor suggested that the only software that was "advisory" to uninstall was ATI Update manager (Catalyst Control Centre was not installed) and reinstall afterwards. Not quite as simple as uninstalling the Update Manager means that you end up uninstalling the ATI driver from the graphics card - this reverts to the old Microsoft drivers that came with the Dell Core 7 in 2009 so not very old). However for the first few months I was plagued by the dreaded ATIKMDAG fault and yet this has stopped since upgraded to drivers 8.620.0. After the install put the Windows 7 disk in and within 2 screens (luckily before the install started) a dreaded BSOD and ATIKMDAG. I was not going to risk installing and have a BSOD mid install so ran latest ATI drives and updated them - this meant ATI Update manager was on but this did not seem to make a difference.
• The upgrade went OK but took 1.5 hours on machine with 6GB of ram and Core i7 processor. There are periods when it seems to stop - leave it go for coffee.
• For some reason Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 need to be reactivated with the activation code when Windows 7 started. I did have KIS turned off during the upgrade.
• If you did have a quick launch bar the folder is still there under
  C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch .
  and you can add it as a toolbar to Taskbar in Windows 7. However as I have found no way or changing the name of tool bar and this takes up quite a lot of space I suggest copying/renaming the folder to something like QL before you add it to the taskbar as toolbar.
• After the upgrade I ran the excellent CCleaner (latest version runs fine with Windows 7) there was some registry cleaning needed to be done but not too much and CCleaner does all this automatically.
• VirtualBox. I run virtual versions of XP, Windows 7 RC and Ubuntu under VirtualBox (highly recommended for PC setup). The XP failed to run or start. The other two used a NAT set up on their network connection but the XP ran on a Bridge connector previously. The NAT setup failed to work with the XP VM (did work with WIn7Rc and Ubuntu) and there was no bridge to choose. Eventually I installed the new version of VirtualBox (3.0.10) as it has been prompting me to upgrade from 3.0.4 for some time. The install obviously recreated the bridge connector that had been wiped from Windows Network connections and the XP VM then ran.
• I have a Dell (Logitech) wireless keyboard and mouse. The little icon in the system tray area need to be set in Notification area to show all the time if you want to see when caps lock is on.
• If you want to use the Windows Live Essentials (including the excellent Blog writer - I use this with Google Blogger) then you need to download it as Windows Update but "Optional". I'm not sure that all the Photo editing tools are integrated and Windows seems to get confused between Live Photo gallery, Prop Photo tools, Windows Photo Viewer. Windows Photo Viewer no longer appears on a search but is there on right click to "open with". However Live Photo gallery does not appear in the list of Program defaults but when you set it up and takes control of various file extensions it does show as being identified for certain file formats but not as list of default programs. Not really joined up thinking.

However the upgrade is well worth doing - much slicker, faster and lots of "gizmos" do seem to make work faster.

Photo tools, Microsoft and Metadata

A useful list of Microsoft photo tool is click here

However it may be useful to point out a subtlety that they do not all work together well with regard to Metadata - a small but crucial part of photo labelling for many. In Windows 7 if you create keywords in Pro Photos Tools they show as tags when viewed in Live Photo Gallery. However if you create tags in Live Photo Gallery they do NOT show up in Pro Photo tools; more to the point if you add a Keyword in Pro Photo tools it OVERWRITES the tags as displayed in Live Photo Gallery and when viewed in Photo Gallery they have gone and replaced with what was inserted in Tools rather than having it appended..

Not sure how Photoshop Essential interacts as do not have it but this fundamental problem between two Microsoft products is disappointing. Metadata seems the Cinderella of photo editing packages.

XAMPP, Wordpress and USB Flash Drive

Testing running Apache and mySQL from USb drive without installation; good for demos without insalling on lcoal machine. This works well and allows you to test the excellent Wordpress (more than a blog) for small and intermediate web sites. The XAMPP package is really easy to install - just copy it to USB, some simple config via XAMPP control panel (start via the .exe) to get mySQL running and configure the database, user and password in the Wordpress configfile (change name by removing "-sample") and will all run from http://localhost. There are detailed tutorials on the web.

Beware if youa re running Skype then Apavhe will not start - hangs on the Port 80 step; close down Skype and all will be fine.