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WhereIsIt? shareware edition, version 3.61 Copyright (c) 1997-2004 Robert Galle All Rights Reserved Last updated: May 5th 2004 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) ================================ 1. Registration and purchase 2. Installation 3. Using the program 4. Troubleshooting 1. Registration and purchase ---------------------------- Q: Why should I register? A: WhereIsIt? is not a free software, a lot of time and effort has been invested in making of this program. WhereIsIt? is released as shareware, allowing you to test it for a limited period of time (14 days). If you plan to continue using the program after that period, you are required to register. Evaluation version also has some limitations that are removed when the program is registered and unlocked. Q: How can I register WhereIsIt? A: The fastest way to register WhereIsIt is to use the online registration form and pay with your credit card. Orders are handled by DigiBuy, using a secure connection. You can expect to receive your registration details by e-mail within the next 24 hours. Regular mail delivery is also available. More details and link to online ordering form can be found on WhereIsIt's home page: http://www.whereisit-soft.com, in the help file, or in the Order.txt file, included in WhereIsIt package. Q: I don't have a credit card, or don't want to use it. Can I still register? A: Yes, some other ways are available, too. Most often used are sending a personal check (cheque, in some countries), or cash, by regular mail directly to the author's address. Both e-commerce vendors collecting orders for WhereIsIt, ShareIt! and DigiBuy, can accept either credit card orders (online and offline), as well as some other payment types, such as checks, bank/wire transfers, purchase and money orders etc. You can find more details in the Order.txt file, or you can consult the "How to Order" wizard in the Help menu, describing in detail all available options for registering WhereIsIt. Q: Do I need to re-register new versions of WhereIsIt? A: No, you don't have to, your license is valid for all future versions of WhereIsIt as well. If I am in any way forced to change this policy, it will not be done without discussing it with currently registered users first. Please note that you may need updated registration details such as key files in order to be able to unlock a major new release of WhereIsIt. Q: I'm a registered user of previous major WhereIsIt release, how can I unlock the current version. A: Each major WhereIsIt version uses its own registration system and a different set of license keys. When a new major version is released, all registered users are e-mailed a new registration package, which includes the appropriate license for the new version as well. If you need to receive a copy of your current registration details, there is a form available on program's web site where you can place a request. Q: I'm working for a company and we would all like to use WhereIsIt. Are there site licenses available? A: Yes, site licenses are available for WhereIsIt. When placing an order, just include the appropriate number of licenses in your purchase, and select that you would like to have them issues as a single site license for specified number of users. Discounts are available for purchases of 5 or more licenses at once. You can find more details about placing orders and pricing in the Order.txt file. 2. Installation --------------- Q: Should I uninstall previous version of WhereIsIt? before installing a new one? A: This is not necessary if you will install new version in the same folder. Just run the setup program, and program will upgrade itself. If you would like to install program to different location, then uninstalling is recommended. Please note that your catalogs will not be deleted while uninstalling, but you will have to configure the program again since old settings will be removed. Q: How can I uninstall WhereIsIt? A: Just open the Control Panel, select "Add/Remove programs" option, and double-click WhereIsIt's entry on the list. If you have created program group for WhereIsIt when installing, you can achieve the same by clicking the "Uninstall WhereIsIt" icon in WhereIsIt's group. Q: Can I be notified about new versions? A: Yes, you can, if you have a working e-mail address. A free mailing list is available for all WhereIsIt users - notifications about new versions and current development news are posted there. You can add or remove yourself from WhereIsIt Mailing List at any time from WhereIsIt's home page, located at: http://www.whereisit-soft.com . 3. Using the program -------------------- Q: Does WhereIsIt run on Windows 3.1, or Windows NT 3.5x? A: No, sorry, WhereIsIt? relies on technology not yet provided with these operating systems. You will need at least Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 to run WhereIsIt. Q: Is there a size limit on catalogs, or how much data can WhereIsIt handle? Is there a slow down when working with large catalogs? A: The only limit are your system capabilities and some common sense practical usage. The theoretical limit per single catalog file is 2 GB in size, which is the equivalent of about 70 million files and folders with moderate use of descriptions, or about 120 million, if using catalog compression in version 3 (not recommended). Practical limits are lower than that though, operations like searching or saving on such large files are likely to take too long to be still comfortable to use. The usual size of catalog files would be up to a couple hundred MB or so, however that's your call. There are a few customers who have their catalogs over 1.5 GB in size (a disk image of corporate network server), and are still satisfied with performance. That's a bit extreme though, a wouldn't recommend pushing it that far. In any case, no one says that you must have just one catalog - in fact you don't usually work with such large collections. WhereIsIt can have opened multiple catalogs at once and use them as one, for example when searching for something. If a single catalog becomes to large for comfortable usage, you can always break it apart into more catalogs. This also gives you the ability to open only those catalog files in your collection that you actually need at the time, and allows you to better organize your collection from the grounds up. As far as speed against quantity is concerned, it's pretty much linear - twice as much data will take twice as long to search. Largest catalogs also take longer to save changes to and require more free space on the hard disk (at least as much as the size of catalog). Other operations are hardly affected with large catalogs, the program only loads parts of catalogs actually needed at the time and there isn't much difference if the catalog is 1 MB or 1 GB in size. The only thing you would have to look out for when working with large catalogs is not forcing the program to load too much data at once. In real life usage this only happens with too liberal search expressions; for example, items that are listed on one of the lists have to be loaded in memory, therefore doing a *.* search on 1 GB catalog may not be a very good idea. If working with very large catalogs, it is recommended to always have a limit set on allowed number of search hits to prevent too heavy memory load. Q: How can change the order of disks, displayed in left tree pane? A: The same way as you would change order of files or folders - by sorting them in the right pane. Select the parent catalog entry in the tree view, so your disks are displayed on the right side, and sort them by clicking the appropriate column header. Changes in disk order will be reflected on tree view, too. If you are using WhereIsIt 3.00 or newer, you can also use drag&drop to manually reorder your disks on the list, or your can use the Ctrl+Alt+ <Up> or <Down> to move selected disk(s) on the list. Q: Can I delete specific files or folders from catalog if I don't need them? A: Not in the older WhereIsIt 1.xx, but version 2.00 and newer do support such modifications, too. Older WhereIsIt 1.xx honors the data integrity in catalog, always assuring that data as stated in catalog resembles as much as possible the real data on your media. The only exception are hidden files, or special items like Recycle Bin, that can be set to be skipped during the disk scan. Version 2.0 will allow you to freely remove any selected item from catalog, although overusing this feature is not recommended. Q: How can one print an alphabetical list of all files in the catalog? A: The easiest way to do that is to use searching in combination with report generator. First, you have to get a list of all items that you would like to print - searching for all files with "*.*" mask should do the trick in this case. Sort resulting list by file names, and click on report generator button. Be sure to selected the "Print data in list 'as is', no sorting" option, in order to preserve items order as they are in search results list (nicely alphabetically sorted). Just select the columns you want in report, and that's it. Searching in combination with report generator is a very powerful and adjustable tool for making all kinds of reports. You can do a lot with it, but you will need to get a bit creative. For some more examples you can check out the "How to..." section in the help file. Q: Can I export my database to be used in some other program? A: Exporting cataloged data is a part of report generator, meaning you can select yourself which data and in what details will get exported. Report generator supports a few different export destinations, including text files (regular ASCII files, tab-separated, or comma-separated), MS Excel tables, RTF documents, HTML documents, SQL scripts, XML documents... Q: How about importing catalogs from some other programs or databases? A: Importing third-party catalogs is not supported or possible, for many reasons. WhereIsIt's catalogs are not just a list of files and folders, there are a lot more details gathered or calculated during scanning the media that are later required for catalogs to function properly, including media recognition, CDDB queries, file system details, using catalogs independently on other systems etc. Third-party data simply doesn't contain the necessary information to create a functional WhereIsIt catalog out of it. Q: I have set the Description Assistant to import text files as descriptions, but this doesn't work. A: Auto-importing descriptions is not what Description Assistant (DA) does. DA is an interactive tool, designed to help you when manually editing your descriptions. For more details about DA, consult the help file and be sure to read the next question, too. A plugin to import user-defined text files as description as also available, however due to some considerations with this functionality it is not distributed as a part of WhereIsIt and is not officially supported. You can download it as a separate package from program's home page. Q: How can I remove descriptions or thumbnails from all items in the catalog? A: There is no function that would say "delete all thumbnails in catalog", just as there is no similar function saying "delete all thumbnails on this disk", or "delete all thumbnails in first, fifth, and seventh folder". There are no such shortcuts available in WhereIsIt if there is a more generic way that can handle all that. The Remove Thumbnail command works on all selected items at once - just get all the files you want to remove thumbnails from on a single list, select the whole list, right-click one of selected items, and select Remove Thumbnail. To get a catalog-wide list of all files, the simplest way is to use the "find in this catalog" command and search for *.* ... Similarly, this also allows you to selectively remove thumbnails from certain items only, for example, from *.bmp files located on certain disks only. The same goes for descriptions as well; select all wanted files, right- click, select Properties, and assigned all selected items a common description (which may as well as be empty). Q: How can I get the program to import my own descriptions during disk scan, or add support for importing thumbnails from new types of files? A: WhereIsIt 2.xx and newer address this problem with description plugins, working over Description API. Basically, it is a way to provide users with ability to include or even write their own description plugins, extending program's ability to handle other, currently unsupported description and thumbnail sources. For example, if you would like to import your *.txt files as descriptions, you could write a simple description plugin for this task. It will be plugin's responsibility, however, to provide the text to be used for description in any way it can. As far as WhereIsIt is concerned, it will just say to your plugin during the disk scan: "Hey, you said you can get me description for parent folder from *.txt files, so here is a folder with some .txt files in it, let me have up to 32 kB of description text then". The full documentation and a sample about DescAPI and writing description plugins is available in the <WhereIsIt>\DescAPI folder. 4. Troubleshooting ------------------ Q: I get a "Debugger detected - please close it down and restart!" message when I start WhereIsIt. A: To begin with, make sure you are not running a debugger like SoftIce on your system, WhereIsIt will not run if a debugger as active. There are two known problems causing this message, both resulting from third-party software using debugger-like approaches. If you have an AMD processor and use ULEAD graphics software products, remove or rename amdfix.sys. If you have an Audigy 2 soundcard, turn off the welcome screen in its drivers. This issue is not limited to WhereIsIt, the same two are well known for causing similar error messages in many other programs and games which look out for debuggers. Q: WhereIsIt 3.xx reports an error message immediatelly after starting and then exists. I'm running Windows 9x/ME. A: This is a known issue with ZoneAlarm (Pro) 3.0 - it's a Zone Alarm's problem, not WhereIsIt's. ZoneAlarm 3.0 is known to mess in some way with a registered version of WhereIsIt and makes it crash. The issue is limited to Win9x/WinME only, ZoneAlarm 3 doesn't cause problems in Win2000 or WinXP. Shutting down Zone Alarm before starting WhereIsIt effectively solves the problem, while older Zone Alarm 2.6 doesn't cause this crash. Q: My computer locks up when I try to display the Settings dialog, and there are no icons visible in main menu's Settings options. A: Please make sure you are using the latest final release of your video drivers - this is a known problem with an older beta version of ATI Rage Pro drivers. It may occur with other video cards as well. For ATI Rage Pro based video cards, the latest video drivers were reported to solve the problem. Q: When I click the CD-ROM drive button in the Add/Update dialog, my computer locks up, or I have problems with scanning any CD-ROM media in general. A: Check your ASPI drivers. While ASPI layer is not mandatory for WhereIsIt to run, it is used when found, as it handles CD-ROM drive access and helps with calculating peroperly CDDB query details. Note that certain third-party ASPI drivers, commonly shipping with CDR software are not standard and can cause problems in WhereIsIt and other applications using ASPI layer. If you are experiencing problems accessing CD-ROM or removable drives in WhereIsIt, re- installing the original Adaptec ASPI drivers may often help to resolve the issue. Alternatively, you can also use the "-noASPI" command-line parameter to disable ASPI layer support in WhereIsIt. Avoid using this parameter if adding audio CDs to catalog, as ASPI is required for proper CDDB handling. To disable using ASPI in WhereIsIt, start the program with the following parameter: "WhereIsIt.exe -noASPI", or modify the shortcut accordingly. Q: Error is reported immediatelly when displaying Add/Update Disk Image dialog. I'm running Windows 9x/ME. A: Fix ASPI drivers on your system, see above. Reinstall ASPI driver layer and reboot. You can confirm this is an ASPI issue by using "-noASPI" or "-noCDmediatype" command-line parameters. Q: I have problems with scanning certain media, what can I do about it? A: Such problems are usually a result of damaged media that can't be read correctly (a scratched CD-ROM, for example), as well as of damaged, corrupted or otherwise invalid files on the media. In case of damaged media there is not much program can do about it, but with corrupted files you can temporarily turn off some advanced scanning features like browsing inside archive files and description plugins. You should be able to catalog any readable media, in worse case by turning off all advanced features and let the program do just a simple scan of media contents. Please refer to the help file for more details. Q: Searching doesn't work - error is reported, searching gets stuck, or the program just quits unexpectedly while searching. A: Those are all samples of a typical behavior of a corrupted catalog file, searching is always the first one to stumble on problems with corrupted catalog data. The first thing to do is to try to rebuild the affected catalog file, using the "File / Rebuild Catalog File" command. What this one does is read the whole catalog file piece by piece, and puts it together again from the scratch, leaving out the damaged parts. This function also has modest recovery capabilities, however it does require that catalog is still readable as a whole. In case rebuilding catalog doesn't work, it should be enough to locate the exact disk with the corrupted part, delete it from catalog, and re-add it again by a doing new scan. Q: Localized characters in filenames or in descriptions are not imported correctly. Can you make WhereIsIt support my local language and characters? A: WhereIsIt already supports all language variations and local characters. If file or folder names are missing localized characters, which appear to be replaced with similar ANSI characters (like missing diacritics), very likely you don't have your Windows setup properly for the language you are using. Make sure everything is set correctly in Control Panel / Regional Settings, especially language and region related settings. If the problem is with descriptions having their localized characters replaced with characters like '+', '-' and similar, you are using the "DOS Graphics Characters Filter" formatting plugin. Don't use this plugin with text that is not in pure ANSI code, many languages use their own localized characters in places where graphics characters are supposed to be, and they get converted as well. A similar problem is needlesly using the "OEM-to-ANSI charset converter" plugin, which can also result in incorrect local characters if used on text already in the correct code page. Q: No descriptions are imported when scanning my media, what can I do? A: Check if description modules are loaded and enabled, and check if description plugins are enabled and in suitable priority order. Also, make sure that you are not using any option that is reserved for special cases only - for example, the "Import existing descriptions from other disks in catalog" should be disabled by default as it requires a lot of resources and can even cause problems or instability during scanning. Q: The CDDB plugin doesn't seem to be working, only generic description are imported. A: There are two plugins that can handle Audio CD tracks, the CDDB plugin and generic Audio CD plugin. Make sure that CDDB plugin has assigned more priority than Audio CD plugin, or CDDB will never get to be used in the first place. Generic descriptions can also be assigned if CDDB plugin was not successful in retrieving descriptions - because of there is no Internet connection, your audio CD is being used by some other application and CDDB plugin can't access it, or just because it is not listed in CDDB database or results returned were not reliable. Please also note the fact that if you are updating disk image in catalog, existing descriptions are always kept unless specifically instructed otherwise. Q: I can't get the program to accept my license key file. A: Make sure that your key file is named "License.key" if you are using WhereIsIt 3.xx, or "WhereIsIt.key", if using WhereIsIt 2.xx. Note that those are two different key files, each for its respective version of WhereIsIt. The key file must be located in the same folder as program's .exe file (NOT, for example, in the same group on your desktop where you have a shortcut to WhereIsIt...) Q: I'm using WhereIsIt illegally with a fake license file, and I have a problem. Can you help me? A: (Question moved to Recycle Bin) Q: I think I have found a bug. Where and how can I submit reports about found problems? A: You can e-mail description about any problem you find to the author (bug.report@whereisit-soft.com). Please be sure to check if you are using the latest version of program, the problem may have already been addressed in the current release. When describing your problem, follow the guidelines in the help file and provide relevant data - try to include as much information as possible for author to be able to repeat the problem - reproducing the error is the first and most important step to solution. Please also include a short description of your computer, including WhereIsIt and OS version that you are using. --- END OF DOCUMENT