10 Years Is a Long Time

Wow. IES will be ten years old next month. It has gone by so quickly and yet it seems like forever. We might have a huge celebration sometime this year. Or maybe we will just go out to lunch. Either way, the marketing people will be trying to make a big deal of this fact. (Get your "I Survived 10 years of IES Updates" button at your local Stuff-Mart, if they are out of stock, just call Garrett at 1-800-707-0816 and complain.)

Old Advertisement, circa 1996

We will definitely be recognizing our old customers this year. Umm, let me rephrase that, our steadfast and loyal customers! If it were not for customers like YOU, IES would have vanished along with Windows for WorkGroups 3.11 and the old 80386 boxes that we used to start this company.

If you have a story to share about your early IES software experiences we would like to hear it. If you have a suggestion on how to fix our current tools so they might last another ten years, we would definitely like to hear that.

Web Site Banner Ad, circa 1998

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Cleaning House

In Today's era of 40 GB hard drives, we do not have to worry about space as much as we did in the past. Yet many of us have found ways to fill up our machines with all sorts of HUGE files and more of them. If you are feeling the pinch, here are some ideas for getting rid of excess stuff both in general, and specifically with IES software.

Windows House Cleaning
There are a number of ways to clean out your hard disk using the features available in Windows itself. Here are some of the best:

A) Start | Settings | Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs. It is a good idea to go back to this periodically and look at all those things you have installed. Do you still use them? If not, uninstall them! Also, take a look at the Windows Components that are installed. (This is a separate list.) Do you really use "MSN Explorer", "Games", "Telnet", or other features that Microsoft has installed?

B) Use Disk Compression. Right-click on your Hard Drive in My Computer, and choose Properties. Find the check-box to "Compress drive". This can take a long time if you tell it to compress all folders and sub-folders, but it can be worth it. Compressed files can actually load and uncompress faster than loading the uncompressed file, so in some cases you will see speed gains as well as getting an extra 50% out of your hard disk.

C) Disk Cleanup Feature. Right-click on your Hard Drive in My Computer, and choose Properties. Find the Disk Cleanup button on the General tab. Be warned, this tool can be slow, but it pays big dividends by cleaning out your Recycle Bin and Temporary folders. If you are not already using disk compression, this tool will offer to compress "old" files for you.

On my machine, I recently discovered that MS Office 2003 has quietly installed 303 MB of "setup files" so that I won't have to insert a disk when it wants to install a new feature! Disk Cleanup can remove this for me if I'm running out of space.

IES Software Cleaning
A) Uninstall old product versions. We design our software so that you can upgrade and run both the old and new versions simultaneously. Don't forget to uninstall the old versions once you complete the transition! On my machine I have 3 versions of VisualAnalysis Package, 2 versions of AnalysisGroup, and the current ShapeBuilder and QuickRWall programs. Total: 92 MB. If I did not have to occasionally run the older versions for technical support, I could save 27.6 MB, or enough space for one or two of my favorite Music CDs in Windows Media Player.

B) Clean out Last Year's Project Files. When you are under deadlines and working hard, you probably tend to make extra backup copies of each project as you make progress. Once you complete the project, you can go back and remove most of these "versions" and backups. Then you should move the really old files off to a CD or tape backup to keep your hard disk lean and mean. One other tip, VisualAnalysis project files tend to increase in size dramatically if you save them with analysis results. When creating your archives you might save them without results to keep them smaller.

C) Once in a while, you might want to do a "Clean Install". When you uninstall our software, not everything gets removed. We leave customizable data files in IESCommonFiles so that we do not destroy your customizations. When we upgrade our software, we sometimes switch technologies and file names will change. Old files may not get removed.

Case in Point
With VisualAnalysis 5.10.0007 we introduced newer, better help for the Database Editors. The new files are .chm (HTML Help format) while the old ones were .hlp files. The update software is not smart enough to delete the old ones. OK, maybe it is, but the guy creating the update is just not smart enough to figure out how to delete the old files for you (sorry).

A clean uninstall is where you uninstall all the software normally (through Add/Remove Programs). Then you go in and delete the folders and files that remain. Be sure to make a backup copy of anything you customized, though! [For an absolutely pure uninstall, you should also delete registry entries and files installed into the system folder, but this is not for the faint-of-heart, and is generally not necessary.] Then install our latest versions directly from the web site. Then put back your customized files as necessary.

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3 Ways to Install Updates

You can get VisualAnalysis 5.1 Package updates in a number of different ways:

1. Start | All Programs | IES | Support | Get VA 5.1 Package Updates.

2. Within VisualAnalysis, use: Help | iesweb.com | Update VisualAnalysis

3. If you already have the latest update, but things are not working right or you just wish to re-install it, you can go directly to the Customer Center, and click the link to "Install Updates".

This approach bypasses the mechanism that checks to see if you need an update and allows you to run the update again. This is useful for "repairing" a broken installation or to add or remove features from your installation. There is no harm in re-running the installation if you think there might be a problem.

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