Hello.
First, I would like to thank the developer for all his hard work. I've been working with PortableApps for several months and been enjoying the simplicity and convenience of its use until recently. A fact, that I can simply insert an USB-drive in another PC and get full access to my software, instead of manually downloading it (and sometimes uninstalling it afterwards) is very valuable for me and I'm extremely grateful for it. Unfortunately, it became slightly less valuable when I discovered a problem a couple of weeks ago. The problem is, that it became impossible to update and/or install new portable applications. Allow me to explain - when I open PortableApps Platform a message pops up: "The PortableApps.com Updater or App Directory is already running. This could be the PortableApps.com Platform automatically checking for updates on startup. Please wait for other instances to finish before starting another.". The exact same window pops up when I attempt to check for updates and get more apps. I can't even update any program manually anymore - an updater doesn't run properly. After a while I decided to completely reinstall PortableApps with all portable applications I need. Right after I reinstalled it, everything runs perfectly: I open PortableApps Platform - nothing pops up, I can update and install new software. But when I eject the USB and insert it back later, the problem returns. I tried using the USB on another PC, and it ran perfectly on the first run. However, when I ejected and inserted it - boom! The same problem came back. No matter how many times I rebooted, reinserted or waited I can neither check for updates nor install anything. Everytime I ejected the USB using Devices and Printers. I'm afraid that if this bug won't be solved I'm going to uninstall PortableApps completely for a time being. Judging by a fact that nobody else has posted anything about such malfunction, this isn't working only for me which is strange.
Thank you and I hope to hear from you soon. -Steve.
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Updating/Installing failure.
February 16, 2014 - 11:07am
#1
Updating/Installing failure.
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Do you have it set to auto update on the start of the platform?
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
The platform automatically checks for updates on startup silently in the background. This is set by default to happen every time you start the platform. This process currently takes up to 30 seconds or more depending on your flash drive. If you run the updater or app store while that occurs, you will see this message. You can only see this message if another copy of PortableAppsUpdater.exe is currently running. It is technically impossible to see the message in any other circumstance. You can disable this feature within Options.
This feature will be greatly sped up in the next release.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
@Above -
Hi.
Thanks a lot for answering so quickly, guys. Answering your question about start-up auto-update, before I reinstalled PortableApps I've checked the options and, indeed, the check for updates on platform start-up option was there and was toggled on. I toggled it off and for first few tries it seemed to sort of solve the problem. But I still needed to wait about a minute or two after the platform start-up to get rid of the message. Two or three days later everything started all over again. The funny part is, that Task Manager wasn't detecting PortableApps updater's process when I ran the platform, yet the message was still popping up. So toggling the "check on the start-up" option off wasn't very effective for me for some reason. However, shortly after I posted this thread I discovered a simple solution - running PortableApps as administrator seemed to make everything work just fine again. Still needed to wait about a minute after the start-up though. It might have been stupid of me to not try it earlier, but I never had to run any portable software's .exe as administrator. Plus I'm anxious, that there will be no such possibility on other PCs. Well, for now everything is stable. Once again, thank you very much for your help.
By the way, I'm not sure if it belongs here or in Mozilla forums, but I also ran into a bug when I tried to update Firefox Portable. First, I clicked "Check for updates" in Help>About Firefox, it started downloading a 13.5 MB update package, then it asked me to restart as it always does. After the restart a message popped out, saying that it can't apply a "partial" update thus the installation of the update has failed. Then, it began downloading the "full" update package (23.8 MB). However, once again the installation was unsuccessful. Every time I tried it was repeating over and over again, until I cleaned up everything in C:\USERS\%USERNAME%\APPDATA\LOCAL\MOZILLA\FIREFOX folder. Only after deleting everything there I was able to successfully install the updated version. I'm pretty sure it's Mozilla's bug, but I decided to write about it here as well.
-Steve.