Installing Programs

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When you are installing a progam and are instructed to "close all other
Windows programs" before installing, should you just close those whose
buttons appear on the taskbar, or do you have to close hidden Windows
programs that may be running. And if you have to close the hidden programs,
how do you do it?
 
CAL in KY said:
When you are installing a progam and are instructed to "close all other
Windows programs" before installing, should you just close those whose
buttons appear on the taskbar, or do you have to close hidden Windows
programs that may be running. And if you have to close the hidden
programs,
how do you do it?
Click to expand...

Just the programs in the taskbar, and mainly, any anti-virus programs you
have running; that should suffice. But be sure your AV (anti-virus program)
is started again after installing said program(s).
 
As a general rule, just closing the ones on the taskbar is sufficient, along with turning off your antivirus software. I never turn off my AV software unless there's a problem with a particular installation.
 
message
| When you are installing a progam and are instructed to "close
all other
| Windows programs" before installing, should you just close
those whose
| buttons appear on the taskbar, or do you have to close hidden
Windows
| programs that may be running. And if you have to close the
hidden programs,
| how do you do it?

What they mean is to close any programs that you might be using
yourself, not the behind the scenes programs etc.. Also, that
way you can't lose any work if the install barfs, plus most of
the time you're going to do a restart, which would also lose any
unsaved work.

You can see the "hidden" programs in various ways but since this
is all new to you yet, I'd stay away from those.
One thing you should be sure to close before installing
programs is anti-virus software. Antivirus can get in the way of
some installs and cause unexpected problems.

Pop
 
It makes an install more likely to succeed. But it's very likely to succeed if you ignore the advice. Well written install programs don't care, only poorly written ones. And even then it doesn't matter most of the time.

They mean as many programs as you can. Computer users are stupid. They will try to update, say acrobat, while running acrobat. But a good install program will just close acrobat down for you. When shared components are being used by a program and an install program tries to update the shared component a poorly written install program may run into trouble. A well written install program detects this and uses the appropiate mechanism to update the files (it requires a reboot).

There are 5 main setup programs which are used in 55% of all installs (3 are from MS). All of these cope with the above.

So I don't bother closing anything.
 
In
CAL in KY said:
When you are installing a progam and are instructed to "close
all
other Windows programs" before installing, should you just
close
those whose buttons appear on the taskbar, or do you have to
close
hidden Windows programs that may be running. And if you have to
close
the hidden programs, how do you do it?
Click to expand...


In most cases, you don't have to close any programs at all,
regardless of what you are told. I normally don't. If the
installation should fail (which happens very rarely), and I have
to do it over (which is the worst that can happen) I then do it
without any programs running.
 
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