Categorized? Hmm first I've ever heard of that lol, I'll go take a look though and see what it's all about. Thanks for the tip BIF

Wow ok I'm completely lost on what that categorization thing is, that site is so chock full of totally out of my league stuff I've no clue. Is this really necessary? Does it help?

Hi Monica.

As detailed in my earlier posts in this thread, I have already attempted to run the installer in XP compatibility mode. The installer works up to a point. The "wizard" asks me the questions, properly responds, then properly copies files. It only fails when it's time to update the registry. VSD won't run because the needed registry information isn't all there in its completeness.

I repeat: The problem is not so much running the program, it is getting the installer to FINISH updating the registry.

I understand that CoffeeCup software is "not written for" 64 bit. But in this case, I'm afraid that a non-64-bit problem might go un-addressed simply because it happened to occur on a 64-bit system.

More about my environment: I use my machine to write and record music. I don't have a 32 bit OS. Even if I could, regressing to a 32 bit OS at this time would be extremely time-consuming and inconvenient, expecially since all of my other website-maintenance tools (office software, FTP software, photo software, video editing software) run just fine on Windows 7.


Greetings, Chad!

I build my own systems. This one is a quad-core system with a Q6600 CPU, an Asus P5KC motherboard with 8 GB of DDR2 RAM to support the aforementioned music interests. The CPU, motherboard, graphics card and other equipment have been in service since 2007. When I built the OS in early January, I first flashed my BIOS to the latest revision, 1203. The BIOS and motherboard have not been exhibiting any strange behaviors or crashes.

The hard drive is a brand-new Seagate 1.5 GB 7200 RPM drive, chosen specifically for this environment. At the same time that I flashed the motherboard's BIOS, I also verified on the Seagate website that the drive's firmware is current. The hard drive did not require a BIOS flash, and it checks out with CHKDSK and other diagnostics. It also does not exhibit any hard-drive related issues (SMART errors or the like).

The OS is installed into two different boot partitions accessible by the Windows 7 Boot Manager: One partition is for all of the strenuous music-making software, and the other for general office work (which has nearly nothing on it but Open Office, Adobe Reader, and a few other things; I don't even have MS-Office on it). It is the "nearly nothing" partition where I'm trying to install VSD, and that's where it's failing.

There were two BSOD issues discovered during my initial shakedown of Windows 7, and both were corrected (on each boot partition). One was my old GeForce 6200 graphics card. It was causing "10D" crashes even with the latest driver. That card has been disabled, and those crashes stopped. I also found a problem with one of the Windows internal 1394 Firewire drivers causing "04F" crashes. I rolled that driver back to a "legacy" version, and those crashes also stopped.

Both boots of this system have been stable with no subsequent crashes, freezes, or sudden outages since about January 8th or so. I've been installing all manner of 32 bit and 64 bit software onto it with no problems or complaints. The VSD installer is the only one that fails. At this time, I think it would be a bad idea to reinstall Windows just for one product.

There was no AV installed on the system when the VSD installer first failed, so there's no AV to uninstall.

Also, the system is running "Windows Firewall". I can shut it off, but since Windows Firewall gets installed with Windows 7, I don't think there's any way I can un-install it.

As I mentioned above, I'm fairly sure that I've got this narrowed down to a registry update issue in the VSD installer, because it's one of the very last things that the installer tries to do. This is not a 64-bit problem. It's a registry update problem.

I'm a sophisticated user and I'm willing to spend my own time to help.

At the very least, I'll bet I can even fix it by manually entering any needed registry keys; I just don't know what they are or where they should go!

As to the 64-bit issue:[

Consumer workstation versions of Windows has been offered in 64 bit flavors now for at least three years (I'm not counting XP/64 or Windows Server).

Sooner or later, CoffeeCup software will need to be made "ready for 64 bit" and eventually, the old "it's not guaranteed but it will probably work" just won't be good enough.

Consider this too: Starting very soon (or three years ago, as in my case) more and more people will be buying or building 64 bit systems. Out of necessity rather than experimentalism or "gotta have". These folks will be doing it specifically for the memory addressability offered by a 64 bit OS for video editing or for music production (any of which might be material to be posted on websites made with CoffeeCup design software).

Most major DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and video editing applications are already offered in both 32 and 64 bit. Eventually, some or all of these vendors will very possiby drop 32 bit support and REQUIRE 64-bit and 8 GB or 12 GB of RAM.

Web design software that "requires" 32 bit will eventually be pushing us in the opposite direction. I hope nobody here thinks it's a good idea to require the user to maintain an old XP system or to buy a 32 bit version of Vista or 7 in addition to the 64 bit version they need for their media work. All just to update their website?

I hope my comments are taken seriously, and in the spirit in which they're intended: to give you a view into the needs of a power user who doesn't have unlimited funds or countless old systems laying about.

Thanks for listening...

Yes you are right, this is the direction that technology is going and software makers should follow. I am sure that CC will follow.

As far as your technical concerns with the registry keys, I can tell that you are an advanced user. May I suggest that you email Scott Swedorski? He is the VP of software development at CC and he works directly with the folks who write the code for CC software. Please share your thoughts with him and let me know how it turns out! His email is scott at coffeecup.com.

Out of curiosity, have you tried installing to the OTHER partition? Might be a longshot, but I'd try it if I were in your shows.



While it's true that the way of the home/business computer is going toward 64-bit systems, we are still in the infancy stage of that transition. I'm sure that CoffeeCup will continue to monitor the market (much like they did with Mac) and when they feel that the time is right, they will invest both the time and $$ toward developing the software. And, although the policy states that 64-bit systems are not supported, they sure try to get it to work regardless but sometimes it just doesn't. This is ONE reason that I had started the thread, asking about folks hardware and their experiences (both good and bad) with 64-bit systems. Unfortunately there either aren't many 64-bit users on these forums, or they just aren't interested in sharing their information. I rather think, that there may be some association with certain configurations working while others don't.



While technically true, it isn't going to happen this year (more than likely), as many vendors still display half to 3/4 of their systems being 32-bit. Until the role is reversed, with 64-bit systems populating (and selling) about half to 3/4 of the sales, we won't see discussions of the 32-bit end-of-life.

Chad, thanks!

Hi, Phil!

That's an excellent idea; installing to my DAW partition. I will try that tonight after work; although it would be a temporary solution because I don't want to have all my other tools on the office partition and DAW+CC on the other. I'd rather keep the DAW just for the music-related stuff and possibly 3D graphics rendering.

But I'll try your suggestion and I'll post back.

And as to your last paragraph:



The vendors I spoke of are the software vendors that make recording software such as Sonar, Cubase/Nuendo, Adobe applications, and so forth. System makers will probably continue to make hardware that's downward compatible with 32 bit OS's and software.

Beginning a few years ago, we started seeing a software transition to "64 bit required" software in the mainframe database world. Advances such as unicode (a double-byte character set that will eventually replace ASCII and EBCDIC) actually require a 64-bit OS to support international language extensions and so forth. IBM's mainframe relational databse already requires a 64 bit OS running on 64 bit hardware, and that began several years ago.

Sooner or later, this will percolate. We got the best ideas from the mainframe world. Ideas such as multi-threading, multi-processing, and multi-tasking, spooling, virtual storage and paging, as well as fast multi-path'd I/O subsystems. That last one hasn't yet been adopted for PCs and servers.

Okay, enough of the mainframe sales talk. I'm not a salesman anyhow!

64 bit-only is beginning to appear in the server world, too:

Sharepoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only.
Windows Server 2008 is/will be 64-bit only.

And even workstation software will follow:

Adobe After Effects is/will be 64-bit only.

I just found those three on the first page of a Google search for "64 bit only" (no quotes), so it probably would not be hard to find more.

Interesting to me is the After Effects one. This is just one (maybe early) example of a media-production package that will be "64-bit only". As I mentioned in my prior post, media is often published to the web. It just naturally goes to follow that our web design software must be ready and able to accomodate the requirements of our media production software.

I know CC will keep up. I trust them in that. But there's no harm in giving a friendly little "push" now and again!

Phil, I'll try your suggestion and let you know.

Thanks for the discourse and have a great day everybody!

UPDATE -

I took Phil's advice above and I have VSD temporarily installed (and seemingly working okay, but more testing is needed) on my DAW (music production) partition, running Windows 7 (64 Bit).

Thanks for that suggestion, Phil!

What follows is a run-down of the conditions that may have contributed to this small bit of success. Of course, some or all of these may not be required, but I've listed them because this happened to be just the precise combination that allowed me to install and start up VSD 5.9 and separately 6.0.

But first off, I do believe there is a registry issue on my office partition (the one I was trying to install to during my initial posts in this thread). I'll spend some time debugging that over the next few days because I really don't want anything BUT media production applications living on the DAW partition. That's an ongoing issue, however; and I'll keep you posted on that as soon as I learn what's broken and how to fix it.

Here's what I had to do on the DAW partition:

PRE-Installation (in no particular order):

1. Disable Antivirus (on this system it's Microsoft Security Essentials)
2. Disable Windows Defender
3. Disable UAC
4. Disable Windows Firewall

5. I deinstalled previously mentioned GeForce 6200 graphic card and de-installed drivers (but I don't think this was necessarily required)

6. Navigate to hard drive location of "installer EXE" file and...
6a. Set compatibility mode to Windows/XP
6b. Set "Run in Administrator" mode to yes.

I don't know "for sure" if items 6, 6a, and 6b were required either, these were just precautions I took.

Installation:

There were no issues during installation on the DAW partition (my second-boot on this system). The installer behaved correctly, copied the files, updated the registry, and created the shortcuts and uninstaller without incident or complaint.

Testing and Debugging:

Execution first failed. Usually signified by a brief change of the cursor from white arrow to the little green "working" ring/circle cursor. Then it would go away. Event log indicated an exception code (forget it at this time) but I looked it up and saw that it was a memory / protection exception issue...why not just call it what it is, a "S0C4"? Sorry, inside joke.

The answer was to change my DEP (Data Execution Prevention) setting so that the first option is selected, "Turn on DEP for essential Windows Programs and Services only"

This DEP setting may be a temporary fix...remember, I run DAW software on this partition, and usually have DEP turned on for everything. We'll see what blows up now, won't we?

One other interesting thing to note: VSD.EXE itself is not set to run in administrator mode, nor is it set to run in compatibility mode, yet it seemingly runs okay under Windows 7 (64 bit).

Going Forward:

As you might guess, my long-term solution is to debug the registry foo-fah (that's a technical term... ) on my office partition, then to re-install VSD over there. But for now, at least I can edit and update my website from the DAW side. Not an ideal situation, but it's only temporary because I'm now confident I can fix the office side.

At this point, I've also decided that if I cannot figure out the registry problem on that partition, then I'm willing to re-install Windows over there. The office partition only has a couple dozen things installed at the moment, so it shouldn't be too painful; unlike the gnawing of teeth I'd go through if I had to rebuild the DAW side, which has gigs and gigs of software and samples already installed.

I'll post any other significant findings, but for now I think I'm good go go.

And oh yeah...I'm not going to let CoffeeCup off the 64-bit hook. You guys've gotta come up to speed on this; for all the reasons I enumerated in my prior posts...and then some.

Hey BIF, glad my brainfart of an idea worked out for ya.



I wouldn't have expected any less. I to feel that there will be the need for it, but as in the Mac campaign (and even the Linux lovers, which are still neglected " I just think it's something that CC needs to monitor. Maybe if a bunch of us post on here that we have a 64-bit system they will keep track, and eventually make that investment.

More to the point, we would need to purchase 64-bit systems for all of our developers and tech support staff which is no small investment. Can we charge maybe $20 more if you want a 64-bit version

I'd pay $20 more. As I would for a Linux package as well