There was a music composition program that I had a demo version of on the computer when the computer crashed two days after I installed it. After deleting the program in safe mode, the computer's been fine. what I wanted to know is: could the problem lie in running the program on the same drive as Vista? I had both in the C drive, but I wanted to know if I ran the program on an external drive if the problem could be resolved. The program was Finale PrintMusic '08 (I'm not sure how many of you have used it, but I figure I'd throw it out there). (And please, let's refrain from all the "helpful" downgrade to XP comments. You know who you are )
I think you might have more problems running it from an external drive. Then again, I like to keep all my applications where they can access the important stuff.
Ultimately, its physical location on the hard disk matters little. Essentially, you could put it anywhere and, provided it was well-written and didn't hardcode any paths anywhere, it could grab every little hook the OS has to offer. Hell, can even interact with the registry from there. I find it curious that merely having it installed was causing issues unless there was some sort of background process associated with it causing problems. I can't think of why a program like Finale would need one of those, to be honest. They claim full Vista support on the 2008 version of their software. Do they have any forums that you might post at to find out more? Better yet, did the computer give you any error messages during "the crash"?
I got the blue screen of death, if that's what you mean. That and something along the lines of "Windows has recovered from the error" once I went into safe mode, with all this mumbo-jumbo I couldn't make heads or tails of. I'll probably go look for the forums, since the free Finale Notepad for weeks beforehand, and the computer's run fine.
Well, the BSOD's have a thing called a STOP message that is basically used by people who really have no lives (i.e. me) to diagnose an issue. Additionally, if you can say, "Well, it gives me a STOP message of blahblahblah if this program is installed, and it doesn't otherwise, and that STOP message is usually devoted to audio drivers, it looks like your program might be doing something funky with audio." Which, ironically, is entirely possible with Vista. MS rewrote the entire audio system (and made it a hell of a lot better), and Finale might have not been aware of a change or something. Vista had the most public beta ever of Windows and all the hardware manufacturers and software authors did was sat on their hands, most of the time.
