I have just re-installed Win XP on my main machine. The spyware was just getting too much. I would love to move to Linux....

Anyway, I have the same issue this time in installing MSDE. It took me 4 hours last time to finally get it to install. I accepted that as my system had been a few months without a re-install, and as we all know, for MS that is quite a while :)

But this is a brand new Win XP. I have only installed a firewall (Trend-Micro) and the MS Antispyware software. Nothing else. Bullcharts goes on ok, then it asks to install the MSDE. It tries to do this, and gets to about 80% on the progress dialog, then just sits there. I left it overnight just to see if it simply took a long time, but it was still sitting there this morning. I have tried this about 3 times now (ie killing the process and starting again). Each time it stops. It did create an error log file, but it says nothing useful (at least not to me).

My machine is an Intel P4 1.7GHz, 512 RAM machine. I am connected via a router to Telstra cable.

Do you have any suggestions that I can try?  I think that the last time I downloaded newer versions from MS and tried several installs. It finally worked, but what worked in the end I now forget. As I said, it took 4 hours of stuffing around - I do not want to go down that route again if I can help it - although so far it has probably taken me an hour.

I have to say that choosing to use the MSDE is unfortunate. It is VERY slow at the best of times. Can I put in my vote for your programmers to look at using a better DB engine? Even the size of the DB file is ridiculous - 405 megs! This should really be less than 100 megs - so it is no wonder it is so slow.

And it is not merely academic. It is so slow to load I often click the shortcut again as it seems nothing is happening. You then get error messages. I also have to wait a LONG time for some screens to load as I use a lot of ribbons - and some indicators take ages to draw. It is really affecting how I use the program, and that is not a good thing. Mind you, at the moment I cannot use it at all...

• Make sure "Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine" doesn't appear in the Add/Remove Programs control panel - uninstall it if it does.
• Delete "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\" if it still exists, just to clear off any last vestiges of MSDE from your system.
• Reboot, just to be totally completely sure.
• Go to "C:\Program Files\BullSystems\BullCharts\MSDE\" and run the setup.exe directly. Hopefully it works, now that we've removed the most common causes of trouble.
• If it doesn't work, make a copy of "C:\MSDELog.log" before you cancel or kill the installer - when you kill the installer, it writes a whole lot of "shutting down" stuff to the log file which just obscures what the real problem is.
• Once you have a logfile, the last few lines should describe what the installer was trying to do when it hit a problem. You can either try and examine it yourself (You can read http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q317328#3 - the Microsoft Support article about troubleshooting an MSDE installation ), or send it to mailto:info@bullsystems.com.au - info@bullsystems.com.au and we'll try to figure out what's gone wrong.
  

Well, this is what I do for a living - I write database applications. I agree that MSDE is better than using MS Access. But almost any DB engine is better than Access/MSDE. I could name several. And all would be faster and smaller and give you less support issues. And do not forget that every user has to run the MSDE - that is always running on my machine, even if Bullcharts is not. I don't particularly like that.

Converting the DB is childs play. I could probably do it in an afternoon. There is very little engineering involved. There are several tools around that do just that. The harder bit is modifying your code to talk to the different DB engine. They all have their little quirks. But since most DB engines now are SQL based, it should be fairly simple. I would certainly mention it to your software guys, and let them mull it over for the next year. If they are any good (and I suspect that that are), then they will already be thinking of how to fix the speed problems.

Anyway, I don't suggest that you seriosuly look at it right now. But I have to say that it is a big handicap. For a start, I cannot run it on my old Windows 98 machine. I have to say that there are still a lot of people out there running these old systems still. I still use Win 95 at work, for example. And of course the speed is a very real issue. I am thinking of upgrading my machine with more RAM and a faster CPU just so that I can use Bullcharts. I should not have to do that.

Here is a good one for you. I just installed Win XP Service Pack 2. For no good reason - but when I rebooted, the MSDE was running! And now Bullcharts works ok. That is really weird as the MSDE install definately did not finish.

Anyway, it is now all working. Thanks fo the tips.

That is weird. Oh well, I'll add it to our BullCharts support documentation - I'm glad to hear everything's working for you again!