I tried to install Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 today on my Windows 7 Ultimate PC and ran into an error at the beginning of the installation. The error message I kept receiving was “Error 1327: Invalid Drive x:\.” I did a quick search and several people had received this message. Solutions included reloading Windows (quite ridiculous) and mapping the problem drive letter to a dummy folder. In my case, the drive is a network drive, so I tried to disconnect it to see if that would help. When it didn’t, I tried copying the installation folder to drive X and installing it from there, which also failed.

Finally, I went to Corel’s site to find an answer. The describe the problem as being caused by “a registry entry which points to a drive letter that no longer exists. The solution to this problem is to add the drive letter MSI ( Microsoft® Installer ) is looking for.  This can be accomplished by re-mapping your CDROM drive letter or adding an additional drive letter which points to your CDROM.” Well, my drive does exist, and who cares if I’ve ever installed a program from this drive. No other program installation has ever complained.

So now I decided to try my own solution to problems with setup programs – bypass the setup program and go straight to the MSI file. In this case, the MSI file is named psppx2.msi. I ran that program, and, low and behold, I had a successful installation. From this, I would say that Corel should stop blaming problems on registry entries and fix their setup program.

In summary, the solution to error 1327 in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2’s installation is to run the MSI program to install the software. The software works fine for me; it even downloaded and installed an update.

While checking out the software Doubletwist (recommended by Maximum PC to remove DRM from your iTunes purchased tracks) I found out it cannot do this.  While going through Doubletwist’s support, some nice person posted information on Daniusoft Media Converter Pro.  The full version was only $39.95 so I purchased it and have been very satisfied with this product.

First, this product is very easy to use.   On the program interface it displays a”Getting Started” page which gives you the 3 steps to converting audio or video as pictured here:

In step 2 before clicking settings, you would choose the audio or video format you would like to which you would like to convert your existing file(s).

One caveat is that you must have the license to the DRM media file to convert it (I assume non-DRM can be converted without a problem).  The program must convert the file while playing it because however long the file is is how long the conversion takes.  So if you have a lot of files to convert, do it while doing something else or queue them up overnight.

I have not yet tried the video conversion but the audio files sound great.  I went with 256kbps MP3 files.  I didn’t dig in to all of the settings because the program was so easy to use and workedby just following the 3 steps displayed on the screen. This program was also a lot cheaper than paying Apple again to upgrade my music to non-DRM files and I can continue to use the program for converting files in the future.

If you have a bunch of music you purchased from Apple or elsewhere that has DRM, I recommend this program to remove it so you can better enjoy your music any way you want it.

I recently came up against a problem that surfaces from time to time for me in my business.  I had a client who just bought a new server and was not happy with the partitioning of the hard drive.  It was a 1 TB drive, but the C drive was only about 40GB.  The client wanted at least twice this size for the C drive.  Since it was a new server and we had time before the installation, we were going to reload the server from scratch, partitioning it to the client’s request during the reload.

Usually when I encounter this problem of a small C drive on a server, it happens after it has been in production for a while.  20GB seemed large enough, but now with updates and program installations, your running short on space.  I’ev used Partition Magic many times before for desktop PCs, but it doesn’t work on servers.  They used to have a product called Server Magic, but this product is no longer sold.  I’ve seen some other products that you can use on servers, but they’ve always been more than I’ve wanted to spend.

So, in the case at hand, it wasn’t a big deal to reload since it was a new server.  However, I was fortunate enough to run across an article by a reader in Windows IT Pro magazine talking about a free program called GParted.  It is a Linux program available through SourceForge.net and works on both desktop and server environments.  The author mentioned using the product successfully many times on servers, and since I had a situation where if we screwed something up we could reload (the original plan anyway), I figured this would be a good time to try it out.

The easiest way to download and use GParted (the Gnome Partition Editor)is to get the iso and burn it to a CD.  It boots into a Linux environment and allows you to create, delete, resize, and move partitions.  We used it successfully to delete the large extended partition and logical D drive, resize the C drive, then recreate the extended partition and logical D drive.  It saved us a lot of time and the hassle of reloading that server.

If you need to fiddle with partitions on desktop or server computers, give GParted a try.

My employee Marvin introduced me to this software and it has worked well for me in two situations and I have recommended it to others a few times as well.  The software is a free download from Malwarebytes website or you can find it in download.com’s top ten PC downloads.  It has proven to work well in removing malware, trojans, etc.

After downloading the software, run the setup file.  At the end it already checks to update itself and start the program.  After the update, you come up to the scanner tab with “Perform quick scan” already selected.  Click the “Scan” button and wait for the program to finish.  If it finds anything,  the “Objects Infected” line will show the number of objects in red.  Click the results button and remove all bad objects found.  A text log file will pop up in notepad to tell you what was done.

You can purchase a personal license for $24.95 which activates the full version, unlocking “realtime protection, scheduled scanning, and scheduled updating.”

I ran across this free download while researching Blu-Ray burners.  Although it is unsupported, I had no problems installing it and running a scan of my PC.  This software answers many complaints I’ve read from people who have bought BD players or burners for their PCs and then couldn’t watch Blu-Ray movies because of a hardware or software problem they encountered after the purchase.

The software is very simple to use.  After opening the program, there is an explanation of what the software’s scan of your PC will do in general.  You are also presented with a large button to click to start the scan.  The scan takes 10 seconds or less and gives you information on basic and advanced playback of Blu-Ray discs (basic establishes whether or not you can play the discs at all).  The basic tab gives you your CPU, video card, memory, OS, video card driver, Blu-Ray drive, software player, and video connection type information.  A green circle next to the categories means you’re BD ready for that item, a yellow circle means you need to upgrade something (depending on the category) and a red circle means the category is not BD ready.  If you receive a yellow or red circle, there is an info button you can click which links to Cyberlink’s website for more information on your problem.

I like this tool because it’s free and it gives you the information you need to determine whether or not your PC’s ready to watch Blu-Ray movies.  I knew you had to have an HDCP compliant monitor, HDCP compliant video card, a Blu-Ray player/burner, and playback software, but this tool gives even more information and puts it in an easy to understand format so there’s no guesswork involved.  If you are considering watching Blu-Ray movies on your PC, check out this tool and see what you need to do to make it happen.

As with most things in Vista, Microsoft has hidden any information when you run the built-in disk defrag, even putting it on a schedule so you never need to worry about it.  While this is a noble effort, I like a little feedback when I run software, especially diagnostic or clean-up software.  At least XP used a lite version of Diskeeper’s defrag software.

Since I had been reading about how crappy Vista’s defrag was, I figured I’d try a 3rd party alternative.  I checked on Extremetech.com and they recommended a free choice – Auslogics Disk Defrag.

A promising sign that this software works well is that I tried to run Vista’s defrag and was told my C drive did not need to be defragmented at that time; then I ran Auslogics Disk Defrag and it ran for probably 20 minutes defragging a few thousand files.  Go figure.

Auslogics Disk Defrag has a graphical picture of your drive and data shows things moving around while it works, as well as a progress bar and what file it is defragging currently.  At the end of the cycle, it provides a basic report of what it did, then asks you to purchase their BoostSpeed software to further improve your computer’s performance.  I guess that’s why they give Disk Defrag away for free.  That one screen is well worth being able to use their software at no charge.  Anyway, it sure beats uses Vista’s crappy defrag.