[@Chris] I’ve now installed on a second machine, also without any difficulty or problem whatsoever, doing nothing at all differently than that which was done with the first machine. Thank you kindly. I’m, though, thinking that I may actually be in violation of licensing by installing on a second machine. If so, indicate same and I’ll most certainly be forward to immediately uninstall.

.
[@Chris]

Category “I hate to hear a grown man cry” Department: you wrote “… The complexity of Windows privileges, mixed with the vagueries of system services and controls being enabled or disabled, seems to be an ever moving target. A quick search on Google will show examples of problems experienced by many software vendors using Microsoft Installer technology … Unfortunately, you may find the same MS Installer issues on your PC will affect v8 installation too …”

( a ) Stop complaining in public about the environment in which you voluntarily work, and into which you voluntarily release your programs.

( b ) It’s not an MSI problem. The direct web link fails. But a step-by-step approach works, where we manually go the the download page first, then we manually select the exact same filename from the failed link in the failed setup program. The problem is at your end, not ours.
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Category “I’m shocked, SHOCKED that others give away current programs” Department: you wrote “… We offer our software here for free in support of SOS. As a commercial business we only do that once we are focusing on a newer version. I am surprised you expect us to be giving away the current version of our commercial software …”

… and you wrote all that as if you have actually never visited SOS before and seen the dozen, DOZENS of current programs offered free by other vendors, not old versions, current versions.

Lemme explain Goodwill Marketing 101 to you …

… SOS, GOTD, Giveaway-Club, Bits du Jour, et alia, are places where vendors engage a wide range of users, and exchange value-for-value, where for the zero cost of giving away a license to a current program, the vendor gets feedback, exposure, expanded users, the chance to knock a competitor out from under some user’s fingertips, familiarity, and, given positive engagement, loyalty.

Try it, you’ll like it.
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Category “Marketing 101” Department: all those goodwill advantages are whittled away to negativity by ( in no particular order ):

— expiring term licenses

— inordinately complex registration

— failure to download, install, and or launch

— cannot be migrated to a new computer, inability to reinstall later

— the vendor not participating in the discussion, helpfully

— unresolved program misbehavior, though you can actually earn extra value by fixing something that breaks during our giveaway trials ( instead of complaining that it’s too hard )

— damage to user data and or the user’s operating system

— real malware infection, installation of unwanted and unexpected side programs

— program incessantly phoning home

— programs that auto update out of the free version

— ancient programs that have not been updated in years, even if they are current

— non-competitive and or ineffective programs

— uncompetitively expensive programs ( yeah, we get them free, but we know when the asking price is outlandish )

— immature unsophisticated user interfaces that cannot be resized, cannot be reskinned for clarity, fonts are not resizable with system or program controls, text messages cannot be copied as text, programs that do not offer standard Create / Save / Edit / Print control menus

— NRFPTY ( Nerf Putty ) programs that are Not Ready For Prime Time Yet ( we are not Alpha Beta testers )

— discontinued programs from which the vendor has moved on

— other users here have additional observations, read the page histories here at SOS, they are a shockingly deep and rich training ground for any programmer wanting to market their offering and wanting to avoid predictable snags.

Tick items on that list, and you tick off folks who tick you off their list in return — your choice.
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Category “Moral of the Story” Department: instead, we could have been enjoying and discussing your program’s features and benefits.
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Thanks, Ashraf!
And thanks, Chris (from Ability)!
And thanks, Peter Blaise, for your always helpful critical comments. I hope your points will be well taken by the people at Ability. In this particular instance I must add that there’s a bit of neglect/laziness on the part of whoever is responsible for the text that accompanied the downloader this time. While the title was Ability 7, the entire text from beginning to end described and referred only to Ability 6. Lack of attention to this detail undermines one’s confidence in the programmers/marketers and, consequently, in the program. Heads up at Ability!

[@david] Hi David,

I’ll leave Ashraf to answer that one :-)

Cheers,

Chris.

Hi [@Peter Blaise],

Thanks for all the time and effort you are putting into this promotion. A few comments;

–

I am fairly sure nobody has been working on our servers or our installers over New Year’s Eve, so nothing changed on our side to make your install magically work.

–

Thanks for the feedback on ‘Find & Replace’. I just checked in v8, almost expecting the problem to still exist, but it seems fine on my PC.

With any such bug report it helps us if it can be submitted using the ‘Online Support’ option from the Tools tab (assuming the issue isn’t failing to install in the first place).

–

The Wiki page;

“… it’s an old name from the early PC years” – that’s certainly true and a great old name too!

“… that has been bought and sold and re-marketed and passed from hand to hand for discontinuous development and eventual mimicking of Microsoft Office, and is now English-sold ( here ) Bulgarian software.” – I can see how you could interpret the Wiki story in that way. However, having worked with the Ability product since 1987 it feels very different to me. ‘Company’ ownership may have changed over those 30 years but it’s development has been quite consistent. After the first few years, changes in development occurred only as required for different platforms. Windows development of the current ‘office suite’ system has been in Bulgaria since 1994, not at all ‘passed from hand to hand for discontinuous development’. And we really like our Bulgarian developers, having worked with them for almost 25 years, so we don’t view ‘Bulgarian software’ as any kind of negative label.

–

All SOS users are entitled to ‘Upgrade’ to v8 at half price; $19.99 for Standard, or $22.49 for Professional. Just visit the website ‘Upgrades’ page. The ‘full retail’ license permits use on multiple PCs – 2 for commercial purposes and up to 10 for non-commercial use by the owner’s family. Both v7 and v8 are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish and Italian.

All the best,

Chris.

[@Sky] I’m sorry for your wasted time.

When installation works normally it would not usually be described as taking ages. Did you see any error messages during download or installation, or other indication things were not working as expected? It is very unusual for the installation to finish, complete with icons on the desktop, only for the applications not to run.

When you tried to run the individual applications from the desktop icons did any screens appear, or any error messages, or did nothing happen at all?

—

Downloads vs Local Backup;

The installers available for download from our website will be the latest releases. As soon as an installer is retained as a ‘backup’ it potentially goes out of date. All users are able to come back to the website to download updates for their existing version as many times as they need free of charge.

@Chris:

I purchased the version 6 of the Pro edition. I noticed there is a counter on the activation, so I do not want to re-install it if I don’t need to, and I don’t want anything else to mess it up. Mainly, I do not want to destroy my current Version 6 installation in order to test the Version 7 standard features. If I install Ability Office Version 7 Std, will it uninstall version 6, or is it even necessary to uninstall 6 to try version 7?
Thanks

Installed, but wont launch. Waste of time. Reinstalled, repaired, same thing. Win 7/64.