Perhaps some better messages would help
I went head to head with the beast and won. Not a big Technicolor battle; just trying to install some software for my sister on her laptop. Something that should have taken five minutes, tops, turned into a battle of wits. I’m glad that I can put away my computer geek armour for the rest of the evening, but this is one skirmish that should never have been necessary.
You see, this was a new installation of boxed commercial software, or so I thought. I had already begun a Windows patch Tuesday, and the installation of her other CD seemed like a way to kill some time. Remove the shrinkwrap, find the card with the necessary instructions and serial number, begin install. Easy as 1-2-4.
Wait; a popup that announces I can go no further since another installation is already in progress. Checked for multiple sessions, but all seemed proper. Could it be the patches from Redmond that have been underway for far too long. Stop it. Stop it. Reboot.
That should do it. Redo the setup command. Same message. I don’t know who I should blame this time, so I stopped, went to the control panel and tried to undo my failed install. Wait; another clue, asking if I wanted to remove the activation information. I hadn’t activated anything… my sister then volunteered that before she’d gone to the store, she had downloaded the trial version a month or so ago that had “run out”. That explains the activation clue. Wipe out all the old stuff, and now we’re “cooking with gas” as my prof at Concordia used to say.
I appreciate the fact that these companies now require multiple levels of authorization using serial numbers that are long enough to cause memory failure. I just wish that it didn’t take so long to find out why a “failure to install” is actually a “failure to communicate”.
