I have used PDFCreator for a long time now (I believe it was one of the first versions released). I remember doing upgrade installs (maybe I mis-remember).
But, now, in order to upgrade you have to uninstall first which means rebooting (which is something I almost never do) before the uninstall finishes, And, then, reboot again after install.
This is one of my pet peeves (and not just with PDFCreator) - doing un-necessary reboots (or manual uninstalls before install/upgrade). The only time a reboot should be necessary in this case is:
1. The shell extension code has changed. And, from the change notes it has not done so for so long...
Even if the Printer driver code has changed it can be changed without having to reboot (and it has not changed in years).
Everything else can be upgraded without having to manually uninstall (reboot), install (reboot) which in my case means about 3/4-1 hr to do the upgrade instead of a few minutes.
So, does anyone know if there are plans to do actual upgrade installs in the future?
(even Sun with Java now do upgrades and not new installs necessitating uninstalls of the old since the 1.6 versions)
Did you ever hear from the company regarding this situation? I, too, am concerned with the uninstalling, installing, and rebooting in between. I have a 2006 version of PDFCreator and have not changed it, partly for this reason. In my mind this is not an upgrade at all - rather installing a newer version. Too much trouble for me at this point - but I wonder if a newer version would run more smoothly. Sometimes I only get 1/2 of my document into the PDF and have to split it into 2 PDF's and send that way - frustrating.
yes we have plans to update the setup to be able to update installs without a reboot. Currently, we are still having users (few thoguh) reporting about problems when not doing a reboot between the two steps. Additionally, we can't just kill services like the spooler to replace a driver, not knowing how many users could be printing at the moment.
So we are working on it, but there are many things to consider.
That's just about as lame as it gets. You never need to kill the spooler to update a printer driver, I update HP, Dell, and Lexmark drivers for customers all the time. In point of fact, for many customers I update Adobe's Acrobat system all the time without a reboot or it stopping the print spooler.
Even if you did need to stop the spooler, any print jobs waiting would resume printing the second the spooler was restarted. You have to fix this, at the very least you need to let us export our custom settings as they're a pain in the... well, they're a pain to put back exactly like you had them.