Off to Zurich today then Geneva tomorrow. It's really annoying that just about all flights go via London Heathrow. It really adds to the journey time. It's amazing how you can get to hate airports. Still it is the essential part of our business in the financial centres around the world. I'd thought I'd got away from all of the travelling, but if the client says meet me for lunch tomorrow near Hauptbahnhof you just pack your bags and go. At least the weather forecast is good, normally it rains whenever I visit Zurich.
I mentioned I'd complete the story on Adobe software on my PC following the upgrade to 64 bit Windows 7. I might as well use the time while I wait for the flight call. A nice thing about Google Blogspot is you can update it from anywhere.
The "PC Mover" software did a great job of moving my application software, but the Adobe licensing schemes seem to be particularly devious and resisted the upgrade process. I guess I should have un-installed their products before attempting the upgrade. Part of that process allows you to move the product to another machine and then re-licence the product.
Anyway I didn't migrate the licence. When I came to use Adobe Acrobat it refused to work with some message about Acrobat could not load the core DLL. The acrobat "printer" didn't work either. My heart sank. I didn't realise just how much I use the Adobe Acrobat product. Things were just as bad with Adobe InDesign. That wouldn't work either. Those products are just about essential for my author activities.
I tried un-installing and re-installing both products but had no success in getting them to run. The problem would not go away. I contacted Adobe. They wanted a prince's ransom for a support contract before they'd talk to me. It was time for some intensive Google work to see if other people had the same problem. Eventually I discovered for InDesign the Adobe licence file had become corrupted. There seems to be a hidden central licensing system installed on your PC whenever you install their purchased/licensed products. I managed to find a utility program buried in the Adobe support pages. After downloading the program and running it I seem to have fixed the InDesign problem.
The Adobe Acrobat problem was more intractable. After un-installing Adobe Acrobat again, I used CCleaner to tidy up the Windows registry file. Then, following some hints from the Google searches, I manually deleted all of the files relating to the previous Adobe Acrobat installs. Many of those were in hidden directories. One more run of CCleaner and then a new install of Adobe Acrobat 9. It finally burst back into life. It was frustratingly complex. It is annoying when software vendors do not pay attention to tidying up the PC when you un-install a product.
That seems to be the end of that story, at least I can get back to normal computing now, though I'm having great fun playing with the video effects on PowerDirector. It is amazing how much disk space these video files consume. My loyal laptop would stand no chance of supporting the editing.
Back to reality in the airport. I have a feeling that I'm going to be pleased I bought a good thick book with me to read while I'm waiting.
Alaric
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