At 11:56 PM 3/4/98 -0800, Peter Lex wrote: >good eving everybody, > >didn t you all feel -today was a hard working day, and for relaxing I as Hi CFT-WIN subscribers. Felt I had to answer Peter's reply to my previous posting. Yes, Peter, this List is for discussion of the CFT program, BUT..... Since there seems to be problems with many users' installation, I thought it prudent to offer some suggestions. I believe that any- thing that helps CFT installation is of value here on this List. Many CFT users are NOT experts, nor do they have access to sites to help them with installation. Since this is really an informal list, maintained by me for Ira, I feel that ANYTHING posted here that helps with installation of CFT, and its use, is "fair game" for discussion here. I, for one, am sick and tired of trying to install new programs and have them fail because of some idiosyncrasy of Win95. We all need help from time to time and we should all be willing to give help to others when we can. Maybe reading some of these posts is boring and only rehashes what some users already know. But remember, the majority of Win95 users do NOT know all the "ins and outs" of installation and usage. To get to some specifics, I have been asked privately by several users about Norton Anti-Virus and problems it creates for SOME users. Note that I say "SOME", not "ALL". To give an example, I recently helped a friend with an NAV problem on his computer. He bought a Toshiba LapTop and one of the first things he did was to install NAV. Then, every time he tried to install programs, the system would freeze, and upon re-booting, he was informed that several necessary .DLL files for Win95 were missing. The program he was trying to install was Microsoft Office!!!!! Now you would think that installing an MS program in Win95 would cause no problems. Anyway, we called the Technical Support number for Toshiba, explained the problem, and the first question the nice lady asked was, "Do you have NAV on your system?" She advised that NAV caused all sorts of problems with installation of ANY program in Win95 on the Toshiba system. My friend did NOT have NAV set to scan anything; in other words, it was just residing on his hard-drive. The lady said that even if it were not active, just the mere presence of some of the NAV drivers would wreck havoc with installation of many programs. We uninstalled NAV, looked through the directories and removed ANY and ALL files that even looked like they were connected to NAV. (Of course, we didn't delete them, we just moved them to floppies, in case we had removed some that were needed later.) Since that time, my friend has had absolutely no problems with installing ANY program. It appears that, even if NAV is not active, and that if the NAV directory isn't even listed in the path in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, for some reason Win95 finds these files and loses its mind. Now, this doesn't happen for every user. Some users are able to have NAV on their system and, as long is NAV isn't active, that is, isn't configured to do anything, have no problems with installation. But, many, many users DO have problems with installation when NAV resides on their system. It has absolutely nothing to do with the program being installed, nor the installation procedure of that program. It's a mighty problem between Win95 and NAV under certain circumstances. And, as I mentioned in the original post, NAV is not the only culprit. Video drivers, sound drivers, etc., can cause serious problems with installation of other programs. I apologize for this long post, but it's going to get longer. Just bear with me. If you have problems installing ANY program, there are some things you can do to help find the problem. I recently tried to install Print Shop Gold Deluxe and it just wouldn't install. I kept getting messages that the program couldn't read from my CD-ROM drive. I called Print Shop Technical Support and here's what the TechRep had me do. I was told to right-click on an empty spot on the Desktop, then click on Properties, then on Settings. I was told to change the Color Palette from "True Color 32-bit" (16 million colors) to 256 Colors. Then, I was told to click on "Change Display Type", and then on "Show All Devices", then on "Standard Monitor Types", then on "Standard VGA 640X480", then on "OK". After this, I was instructed to re-boot my computer with those settings. I then attempted an installation of the program, and guess what? It installed perfectly. All this while I was on the phone with the TechRep. She told me that my Video Drivers for the Trident video card were causing conflict with the installation program and that I needed to down- load the latest drivers from the Trident web site. I looked through the documentation for my video card, found the URL, logged on, and lo and behold, found that there had been several up- dates to the drivers since the ones that came with the software with my video card. I downloaded the new drivers, installed them, and then attempted another installation of the same program. ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEMS. After installation, I reversed the procedure and changed my system back to 16 million colors, SVGA 800X600, using the new Trident drivers. No problems with running the program, just in the initial installation. There is a lesson here. I don't care if you bought your computer system YESTERDAY, chances are the various drivers on the system are already outdated. Some of these systems have been sitting in warehouses for months, even a year or more. You HAVE to download the latest driver software before you get too deeply involved with installing new programs. If you don't know the URL's for the various hardware parts of your system, just go to the Microsoft web site and navigate to the page for updated drivers. Search through it and find those that apply to you and download them. This usually works, but you SHOULD try to go to the sites for your specific hardware. Look through the paper documents that came with your system. You will find the Web addresses for their sites. To get back to NAV, I'm going to tell you right now, that until Norton solves some problems, you will have problems sooner or later with installation of software, even if you don't have NAV activated and only have the files residing "dormant" on your hard-drive. I'm sorry for this, as I have used NAV ever since I got my first 8086 and used Norton Anti Virus. (That goes a long ways back and most of you don't even know what an 8086 is. Hint: it was two systems before the 286.) I have been a faithful user of NAV, always paying the necessary money to keep it updated; but, as of now, I am not using it until it is "fixed". Some other things that you might consider are duplicate drivers in various directories on your hard-drive. There are certain files that reside normally in your Windows directory or in your Windows\System directory. Some installation utilities also install these same files in the directories for the specific software. If the files in these software directories are not the same as the ones in the Windows or Windows\System directories, they can be potential problems. Get a good utility that scans your hard-drive and allows you to remove duplicate files. Make sure that you keep the most current versions of whatever duplicate drivers the utility finds, and make sure that these files end up in the Windows or Windows\System directories. Nuff for now, SgtGeorge CFT-WIN List Administrator