WINDOWS VISTA

Note: our original posting on Vista is at the bottom of this page.

Originally we thought that the problems running on Vista could be solved by revising the program installation. Unfortunately, that is not true. It will take some some significant program changes for our programs to run "properly" under Vista.

In the meantime, the short answer is that EasyGrapher programs must be run with administrator rights, otherwise called "as administrator."

While we may have found a problem installing fonts on Windows Vista Business in early testing, this has not been duplicated on our in-house test computer that has Windows Vista Home Premium, which is the Vista version most of our customers will be using. It may be that this is a problem that is peculiar to Vista Business or it may have been a problem with the particular computer we had for testing. 

For now, we do not think it is necessary to change our installation, which means older versions of our programs can be installed successfully. If you have a problem installing, certainly let us know.

A large part of the new Vista security is the User Account Control. This is a "watch dog" of sorts that tries to make sure that you really want to perform certain actions that have the possibility of making unapproved changes to your PC. Depending on how you use your computer, you may see many windows pop up from the UAC asking permission to continue the action you requested. This is not normally something of concern if the warning appears because of an action you initiated.

Some software publishers suggest that the UAC be deactivated. We do not think this is necessary for EasyGrapher programs at this time.

How to install and run EasyGrapher programs under Windows Vista

Installing EasyGrapher programs is done the same as with other Windows versions.

After installing, you must maake the program run with administrator rights.  To do this:

• right-click on the program icon on the desktop; a menu will appear.
• choose Properties; a window will open.
• click on the Compatibility tab.
• click the checkbox labeled Run this program as administrator.
• click OK.

Run the program as usual. Before you see the splash screen, you will see a window from the User Account Control (part of the new security) asking whether to continue to run the program. click Continue and the program will start up.

On the Compatibility tab you will see an option to run the program as though it were running on Windows XP or other previous Windows versions. So far we have not found any difference in how our programs run if this option is set.

Many customers and potential customers have questions about how our programs work with Windows Vista. Below is a discussion of what we found after some experimentation one weekend with Windows Vista Business.

The comments refer specifically to EasyGrapher Professional and  EasyGrapher Stitch Wiz. What is true for EG Pro should also be true for EasyGrapher Home and EasyGrapher Specialty.

Ken Davis

I have been working with Windows Vista this weekend. What an unpleasant experience - but I expected that.

I preface my findings with the note that while I have a workaround of sorts, it is not the ultimate solution for installing and running EasyGrapher programs on Vista.

One item that is true for all programs is that they must be run with "administrator rights."

This is not the place to go into what that means, but after the program is installed, you have a couple of options to do this, assuming you have the Windows authority.

1. Right-click on the desktop icon for the program and choose "Run As Administrator." This is only a temporary fix. You must do this every time you want to run the program.

2. To permanently set this:

     - right-click on the desktop icon
     - a context menu will appear
     - choose Properties
     - a window will open
     - click on the Compatibility tab
     - click the checkbox "Run this program as an administrator"
     - click OK.

Then double-click the icon as usual to start the program.

Once the program starts up, you may see a window or two that essentially asks you whether you really want to run this program and whether it is safe to run it. Answer "yes" as appropriate.

For EasyGrapher Stitch Wiz customers, this is all you need to do to run Stitch Wiz successfully on Vista as far as can be determined. We did some limited testing with no problems found.

If you do not run the program as administrator, you will see an "error 75 path/file access error" message when the program starts up.

There is one more hurdle for EasyGrapher Professional.

It appears that the software package that we use to put together program installations and patches does not know how to properly register fonts to Windows Vista.

Just so you know, to make a font usable in Windows, the font file must first be copied to the Windows Fonts folder and then Windows must be told about it (register the font).

What happened when we tried to install EG Pro is that when it reached the point of trying to register a font, the installation hung.

The temporary solution is that we change the installation so that when the program is to be installed on Windows Vista, the install program must copy the font files to a folder where the program is installed. Then the fonts must be installed in Windows manually.

Modifying the installations will have to wait until after we return from vacation.