Since the advent of Windows 7, some of our customers have had problems with software updates because the update does not install successfully. These problems do not seem to happen in Vista but maybe nobody uses it!
These problems take the form of firmware mismatch or sometimes settings are not saved properly, and can affect some of our products and any other older software you may have.
Why do these problems happen and how can you overcome them?
Microsoft have created new “security” features in Windows 7 that limit how a program writes to Program Files folder. Any file written to this folder is copied to a Compatibility Files folder. When you do an update, Windows reverts to these file copies EVEN if you uninstall the previous version first.
This means that firmware version numbers or other settings do not get updated properly as Windows can use the old versions it has stashed away not the new ones. There does not seem to be any consistency between different installs of Windows 7 as some installations don’t give any problems but others do, go figure.
How do you stop this happening? The easy answer is to open the install folder in Explorer, generally C:\Program Files\embres\[program name]. If Windows has made copies of the files, there will be a Compatibility Files button at the top of the screen.
Click on this button and delete the files shown in the Compatibility Files folder. Installing the update should now work fine. Kanda are updating all their software to use a manifest and to store data in Local Application Data folder rather than Program Files, but it takes time as we need to keep supporting XP.
Nice blog, thanks for sharing 🙂
Thank you, I learned something today