Aarrghh! New laptop with Vista Home. Trying to install python and get this mysterious message “The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed.”. Now, I’ve installed at least a dozen applications since the laptop arrived, some of them were MSI’s, so it is really unlikely that the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. This is a new laptop with the OS installed by the OEM, Toshiba. So you’d think that if it were incorrectly installed at the factory, it would have never worked in the first place.

Some googling turns up all sorts of advice, including messing with the registry, upgrading the installer to the latest version (presumably a brand new machine would have the latest version), and running msiexec.exe /unregister followed by msiexec.exe /regserver.

None of that stuff worked (no, I didn’t mess with the registry – that one didn’t ring true to me). What did work was checking the task manager (ctrl-alt-del then start the task manager) and looking for any instance of msiexec in the processes tab (click the show processes from all users button first). End process any that you find. Once all are gone, close the task manager and retry your installation.

In my case it worked. Apparently a previous run of the installer was hung up on shutdown (hence the need to end the process) so any new attempts to install were failing. No clue why the previous instance hung…. that’s for another story if I ever find out!

Here’s one of those free services that can come in handy when you need to convert a PDF file to a Word Doc and don’t have any tools around to do so.

PDF To Word is just the solution. Online, available anywhere you can get to a web browser, free, and simple to use. Just upload the PDF file, fill in your email address, and five minutes later you will receive the converted file in your mailbox.

I’ve found reasons to use this handy tool several times and have been happy with the results each time. It also supports RTF output for those with word processors other than Word.

New laptop, a Toshiba A505 with Windows Vista Home (ugg) but a free upgrade to Windows 7 is pending.  This one replaces my five year old HP Pavillion, retired now.

Now, I’m a newbie to Vista, but not to laptops. I regularly hibernated the old HP without any major issues (until it died after hibernating with a completely blown partition table, but that’s another story).

Imagine my surprise when I put the Toshiba away at night (in its’ laptop case) and wake the next day to find a very hot laptop in that case with a dead battery.

Seems that something comes on in the wee hours of the morning and wakes up the hardware, even though it is on battery power, and proceeds to run things like Windows update!  The verdict is out on exactly what is causing this (prime candidate is Windows Update itself) , but clearly in my case either Toshiba or Microsoft has dropped the ball in configuring these laptops.

No way should this behavior happen out of the box and no way any normal user should be expected to figure this one out. Poor quality control on someone’s part for sure. Since more than the Toshiba brand seem to be impacted (see article linked to above), my money is on Microsoft as the culprit. Aarrghh!