Harmeet,
The problem has been resolved. The technician I spoke with told me to reinstall my OS because my directory was corrupt. However, all I really needed to do was go into the Windows registry and delete the keys pointing to the old copy of Acrobat 7.0.
You might advise your technicians to suggest a manual search for offending older Acrobat keys in the registry before taking the drastic step of reformatting the computer. It might save another Adobe customer with a similar problem many (additional) hours of work and worry.
–
Debbie
Category: Software
Two weeks ago I came home greedily hugging my new copy of CS4 Design Premium and promptly spent over 6 hours trying to get all of it to install. Eventually I got everything but Acrobat to go; I wound up getting a copy of Acrobat Reader to open client documents over the last two weeks (and still had an old copy of Acrobat on my laptop to use for editing, thankfully).
I submitted a ticket with Adobe last week and it was finally answered today, although I didn’t understand the short answer. So I called tech support – and that was the end of my workday.
I spoke with a guy I could barely understand for 1 hour and 25 minutes. I spent about 15 minutes of that re-explaining what he could have read himself at the bottom of my ticket about what I’d tried, what worked and what didn’t.
About halfway through the call it dawned on him that I had the rest of CS4 installed fine and that it was only Acrobat that wasn’t working. I could detect the light bulb going off all the way from Colorado.
So… The last thing I’d tried was creating a new user account in Windows XP and attempting to install just Acrobat. That didn’t work. I kept getting a 1714 error saying that I still had an old version of Acrobat on the computer, even though it wasn’t listed in add/remove programs.
He went away for 10 minutes while I was on hold (I was on hold for most of the phone call actually) and happily came back to report that he’d found the solution.
“Please go to Adobe and search for this page: kb406241.” That’s (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/406/kb406241.html to us supportees.
I said “Yes – that’s the page I have open right here in front of me. I’ve already done that entire procedure and it did nothing for my Acrobat problem.”
Total silence on the other end of the line for all of 15 seconds. Then “please hold on one minute.”
When he finally came back, he told me that it was obvious that my registry was corrupted. The only solution left was to reformat my computer.
Ummmmm…. no. I said “no.” I don’t have a couple of spare days right now to wipe my computer. There’s no way.
So he escalated my ticket to “Tier 1 Support,” gave me a new case number and assured me that I would hear from them in 24 hours.
I hung up and went online to search for ways to fully remove old copies of Acrobat. I found a few posts that sounded promising and I followed their directives:
- Open the registry by clicking on Start > Run > regedit.
- Export a backup copy of the registry first.
- Do a search for Acrobat – there shouldn’t be any Acrobat keys in the registry; I found a ton of Acrobat 7.0 ones hiding in there.
- Delete the Acrobat 7.0 keys AT YOUR OWN RISK. Be careful not to delete anything else.
I did this, then I rebooted my computer. I logged in, put the CS4 DVD in, and crossed my fingers.
Acrobat 9 Pro installed with no problems whatsoever.
So thanks Adobe: you told me to reformat my hard drive because of an installation issue (documented in your forums) when all I really needed to do was clean up my registry. That’s some fine tech support for the many hundreds of dollars I’ve given you over the years.
Once again Carbonite has come through for me. I located some files that were accidentally deleted on the 11th, all safe and sound on the Carbonite online backup site. That just saved me an hour of work.
Carbonite is about $55 per year with unlimited storage – that’ s a bargain IMO.
I’ve been using the free, old version of activeCollab for years and was pretty happy with it, except for one major problem – there’s no way to save a project template. So every time I created a new project, I would spend 1-2 hours setting up all the milestones and tasks.
That was getting very time-consuming, so I started looking for other solutions. Basecamp was pretty good but seemed expensive with its monthly payments – $24 to $49 per month depending on how busy things were. Then I looked at the paid version of activeCollab.
It looked good -very similar to what I had, but quite enhanced from that level. I bought a $10 hosted demo that was fully functional for 30 days, and used it for three projects. I loved the fact that I could now create a project template (or as many as I wanted) – that was the biggest thing for me.
So my demo expired and I was ready to buy. activeCollab comes in two versions – Small Biz ($199) and Corporate ($399). Two of the main differences were that the Corp had both the calendar and time tracking. I could live without those, so I bought Small Biz.
Today they sent me my hosted demo database so I could import my projects into my new install. That worked flawlessly, but when I logged in and started working on one, I kept getting an error.
I went back to their site and discovered that managing tasks, which I would consider to be a crucial, default-level function in any project management applications, apparently is not important for small business users.
I spent quite a lot of time researching my options, then actually using this software in the last month. I like AC a lot – but if I’d read the list of differences more carefully I would probably have not even considered this product.
Now I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Should I fork over the additional $200? That really rubs me the wrong way, paying for something that IMO should be included as a very basic feature. But if I spend more time going out and looking for something else, would I just be better off giving in and buying this upgrade? Ack ack ack.
For the past few days, I’ve been unable to dump anything from phpMyAdmin. The host told me it was because my DB was large (wasn’t) and another suggested I try another browser.
I use FF for everything, but I tried it in IE7 and voila, it worked.
Doing a bit more investigating I found a forum where someone was having a similar issue and the suggestion was ‘toss your cookies.’
I tossed mine, and suddenly FF is exporting again in phpMyAdmin. Lesson learned (and recorded here for future reference).
REVISED 3/20/08
Actually this turned out to be a FF profile issue. Here’s what Mozilla told me:
Occasionally a Firefox profile will get gummed up in a way that is very difficult to track down.
As a diagnostic, you could try using a “clean” Firefox profile: Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base. If that works, then one of your extensions may be at fault, or a bad setting, or a corrupted file. If the cure isn’t obvious, you can move your bookmarks and (selectively) your other settings to the new profile: Migrating settings to a new profile @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base.
Well, a few hours after the previous post, I returned home to find a message from Mozy’s Vice President of Support. I called him back and did get a sincere apology as well as a promise to provide me with a download link to my two backup sets so I could get them without having to go through the usual file listing screen.
I did appreciate the call and have downloaded the first backup set without incident, the second one’s underway. However, they’ve already refunded my last payment and I will still be closing my account – I just don’t feel like I can trust that I’ll be able to access my data in a hurry if I need it in an emergency. I’ve got two external drives now for my new computer, and I think I’ll be relying on those rather than online backups from now on.
