Ian Wigston

Following my initial post on the third of March I decided to try and resolve the problem myself. As I no longer had a PC running Windows XP Pro I gave my son, who is a Senior IT Technicion, copies of my PTE applications and the relevant keys to try on a machine still running Windows XP. The idea being that if he could open and run the files then clearly the problem would be with Windows 7. He came back to me with the news that he had been unable to open the zipped files and believed them to be corrupt. I then went to the external drive where I had stored downloaded software and other data and began checking other items and copies of downloaded drivers and discovered that they too would not open correctly, indicating that they were corrupt. The six external drives I had been using were all 500GB La Cie Bricks and had been working fine until shortly before I finally decided to rebuild the PC when I began to get error messages telling me that a drive was unformatted or that it could not be read. This did not apply to all drives and four were still accessible and seemed to be operating correctly so when I decided to copy data from 'C'Drive to one of the working drives I had no reason to suspect there would be any problems. In reality the data was not copied correctly as my earlier post indicates. With hind sight I should have checked that the files I had copied worked but like most people I put my trust in the technology and thought no more about it. Along with two colleagues I photograph museam collections of art and artifacts and we have used La Cie drives to store the images we take but have experienced problems with both the power packs and the circuitry in the drive cases provided by La Cie. Whether the problems I experienced were due to the La Cie drives or the failure of Windows XP to write to them remains open to conjecture but suffice to say the cause of the problem has now been identified. A member of the AV group I belong to gave me copies of PTE that he was using so that I could try them with windows 7 but for some strange reason the Keys I had which were stored on the same corrupt drive would not work. I received a replacement Key from WnSoft this morning and everything appears to be working correctly so I have updated my Delux version which had expired in July 2009 and look forward to being able to produce AV's once more. Ian

Hi, I am a new member, just joined this evening but hace been playing with PTE since 2003. Early in 2009 my PC crashed and I decided to rebuild but had a number of disasters with external drives which have only recently been resolved and during the last two weeks my newly built PC is actually running. I have a clean installation and am running Windows 7 Ultimate, 32bit. My problem is that I cannot re-install PTE 5.5 De Lux or earlier versions which were in zipped folders and copied accross from my old HDD. When I click on setup in any version either a window opens inviting me to extract all files and when I do I get an error message 0x80004005 or, alternatively when I click on setup a window appears containing the following message: "Compressed (zipped) Folders Error. Windows cannot complete the extraction. The destination file could not be created". The latter message applies particularly to v.5.5. After trying for sometime to activate the older versions I decided to try downloading PTE 6.0 but when I tried to use my Key I received a message telling me it was for a different product. Neither my original Key nor that for v.5.5 would work, the same message was received for both. During the time my PC has been out of action I feel certain that my Licence for V.5.5 should have been renewed but I would still have expected it to run with limited facilities. I have sent a message to WnSoft and am awaiting their response but would be interested to know if anyone else has experienced similar problems or has an answer to it. During 2009 I bought a MacPro running Snow Leopard and am looking forward to the advent of PTE for Macs.