FAQ - Versions 2.9 & 2.10.
This page has been revised for Versions 2.9 and 2.10, but some earlier
material has been retained at the end, too.
A. Any machine that is running Windows 98 upwards will run
CASE*track. The only absolute requirements are:
1. Your machine must use a display resolution of at least SVGA standard, ie 800
x 600. NB This requirement has been revised to 1024 x 768 for CASE*track
3
2. It must also have a 'reasonable' amount of disk space available. It's not
possible to give a figure, since it depends on operating system, how much data
you will have, and what other programs you use. As a rule of thumb, if you
don't have at least 20 - 25% free space on your C: drive, you should resolve
this before installing CASE*track. In fact, we would strongly
recommend that you do something about this even if you don't intend to use
CASE*track - Windows can "exhibit strange behaviour" if there isn't
sufficient disk space for temporary files etc.
A. CASE*track will run perfectly well on both peer-to-peer and
File-server based networks. You can also decide to dedicate a spare workstation
on a peer-to-peer network for use as a database fileserver; note however that
Windows has a built-in limit of 10 simultaneous connections to one machine, if
it isn't running a server operating system. Thus you could run a ten-user
CASE*track system on peer-to-peer, but more than that and you will need to
go for a file-server (NT4.0, Windows 2000 server, Windows Server 2003)
Also Microsoft recommend that in a peer-to-peer environment, you should not use
an older version of Windows on the machine carrying the database, than on the
other workstations. ie don't use a Win98 box for the .mdb file and connect to it
from XP workstations.
Your network must be solid and reliable though, with no glitches or occasional
odd behaviour. If it's not, keep on at / change your network supplier until it
is.
Also we strongly recommend you set up your network from day 1 with proper unique
usernames, passwords, and machine names etc, even if it's just peer-to-peer
(and even if you're not using CASE*track - it's still better practice).
A. We currently recommend that you do not run CASE*track
on a wireless network if you can possibly avoid it. They are too prone to
interference and other connection problems. Even a momentary network
disconnection at the wrong time can damage a file that's in use. If it's a
letter, it's annoying enough; if it's part of your database, it can be more
serious. And that's before we start talking about security issues.
A.
The key difference between stand-alone and network installations is the location
of the database file, which is located on the local machine in stand-alone
installations but on the fileserver in network installations. The database
file ct.mdb, and its corresponding security file ct.mdw, are held in a separate
'server' directory on the distribution CD - the database installer on the CD
will copy these files to C:\Program Files\Casetrack for a stand-alone, or to a
directory on your server (or peer-to-peer workstation designated as database
server) for a network installation. Or you can copy them manually, if you need
to.
A. ZCS doesn't have any Linux expertise, and we don't 'officially
support' Linux - ie we don't guarantee
that CASE*track will run on a Linux platform. It certainly won't run
on a Linux
workstation. However, some of our users have Linux fileservers configured
to appear as Windows servers to the rest of the network. CASE*track
can
be made to work fine on these. But if you have server-related problems (and
our experience is that you probably will) these must be resolved by your Linux
support person. It is worth pointing out that setting up eg Samba to
imitate a Windows server sufficiently accurately to host a database is
significantly more of a challenge than merely hosting file-and-print.
Furthermore, we are currently developing CASE*track v3.0 using a MS SQL
Server 2005 Express database. This will definitely require a server running
Windows.
A. From within CASE*track, click the 'About' button on the
main menu. The 'Database path' box displays the database file you are currently
using. This is the same as the 'Location' setting in DCU. It is stored as
part of the user profile. It will be named either CT.MDB or CT2.MDB by
default, but this may have been changed. Upgrades automatically perform a
backup, to a file with a year month day hour minute filename eg 200211050925.mdb
A. Your existing system should be running the latest version, without
any error messages etc.
- Backup your existing database file (normally ct.mdb but see above) and
your ct.mdw file from the directory c:\program files\casetrack
- Install CASE*track on each workstation from your latest CASE*track
CD. You don't need to register it - just install it.
- Apply any maintenance upgrades etc that you have downloaded and applied to
your current system
- Create a directory on your server, give the users full permissions to it,
and place the files from step 1 into it.
- The first time each user runs case*track, they will see a dialog asking
for the location of the database file. Tell the users to browse to the
ct.mdb file in the directory created in step 4.
Notes: (i) We recommend setting up drive mapping so that the CASE*track
directory on the server does not appear as a root directory ie the location
setting reads something like 'T:\casetrack\ct.mdb' not 'T:\ct.mdb'
A. Just follow steps 2,3 and 5 above.
A. Your existing system should be running the latest version, without
any error messages etc.
- Backup your existing database file (normally ct.mdb but see above) and
your ct.mdw file from the directory c:\Program Files\Casetrack
- Install CASE*track on the new workstation from your latest
CASE*track CD. You don't need to register it - just install it.
- Apply any maintenance upgrades etc that you have eg downloaded and applied
to your current system
- Place the files from step 1 onto your new workstation in the C:\Program
Files\Casetrack directory
- When CASE*track is run for the first time, you will receive a dialog
asking for the location of the database file. Set it to the database file in
C:\Program Files\Casetrack that you copied over in step 4.
If you have difficulty getting the .mdb file off the old machine (a laptop
with no network connection and only a floppy drive for instance) one of the
following suggestions may help:
A. The Setup program on the CD is configured to install CASE*track for
'all users'. Consequently, the CASE*track icon will appear on the
desktop irrespective of who you log in as. Thus in the very simplest case, you
don't need to do anything - just log in to Windows as the new user and start
CASE*track. It will ask you for the location of the database; set that,
and you should be in business.
Unfortunately, though, you will most likely have more to do than
this. In its wisdom, Microsoft has made it a little more complicated
than that in most cases . . . . (You may have already experienced
this issue when installing MS Office etc). The exact sequence of
things you will have to do depends on what version of Windows you
have, what sort of network, and how CASE*track was
originally installed; however, these steps should work:
1. Log in to Windows as the new user.
2. Load the latest CASE*track CD into the drive, and
locate the 'Workstation' folder
3. Double-click 'Setup.exe' to run it
4. If the setup program offers you the option to Install, then do
that; if it offers the option to 'Repair or Remove' then select
'Remove' then re-run setup. (This will not remove your database)
You may find that you have to repeat the above steps for each user on the
machine.
You may also find that you have to temporarily promote each user
to a member of the administrators group in order to do this.
See the next question for more information:
A1. Give the user Administrators rights, run CASE*track,
providing the CD if necessary; then return the user to previous status.
You may be able to do this
by Shift + Right-clicking the CASE*track icon, selecting 'Run As' from the
pop-up menu, and entering an administrator's username and password. (Windows
is smart enough to know that in this situation you want to run the program with
the administrator's permissions, but with the current user's profile.)
A2. Give the user Administrators rights, run setup.exe from the installation
CD; then return the user to previous status.
More info:
This issue is a result of design decisions by Microsoft.
In Windows 2000 and later, (1) program components are installed and
registered individually for each user; but (2) it's clearly possible to add
users after a program has been installed.
Well, in this scenario, the new users would not have a complete installation
of the program. To resolve this, Microsoft chose to provide the 'install on
first use' feature, where only certain parts of a program including desktop
icons etc are actually installed by the installation process - a whole lot of
other stuff is done the first time the user runs the program. However, (3) on
XP, users who are not administrators do not by default have sufficient
permissions to install software from a CD - Thus you can have the situation
where the Administrator comes along, installs a program from CD, logs out, user
logs in, tries to run the program, program needs the CD, user inserts the CD,
user hasn't got administrator permissions so (4) instead of an error message
telling you what the problem is, you get the misleading one saying "a valid
source could not be found . . ." which, if it means anything, implies the CD's
suddenly faulty??!!
Latest versions of CASE*track 2 installation use a couple of
techniques to minimise this issue, but it's not possible to resolve it
completely when installing locally from a CD. However,
if you have a 'master copy' of MS Office, CASE*track, or whatever on
your server, and install from there, these problems should not arise ( as long
as the network location is still accessible).
Furthermore, Windows attempts to keep track of what bits were
installed for which program, and where they were installed from, so
it can ask for the appropriate CD or network location if it's not
already available to it. This 'keeping track' process isn't
perfect, however, and sometimes gets a little confused. When this
happens you can get the situation where Windows will ask for eg the
MS Publisher CD in order to run CASE*track, or vice versa.
A. 'Licence Count Exceeded' means that you have attempted log on more
users than your licence permits - usually 5. If a user doesn't close down
CASE*track correctly, it can appear that the user is still logged in and
hence you will reach the licence limit before you should. Normally when
everyone logs out of CASE*track, the last session to log out silently
clears up any of these erroneous logins and the problem corrects itself.
Start DCU and go to Maintenance | Users - the 'logins' column in the grid will
show you who's logged on, or who CASE*track believes is still logged
on. When searching for the elusive machine that's still running CASE*track,
note that it's possible for a program to continue to run without appearing on
the taskbar. This shouldn't happen, but it's possible for a bug to get a
program into this state. You can use the 'Processes' view in Task Manager to
look for this.
A. The data is stored in a file usually named CT.MDB or CT2.MDB. On
a stand-alone machine, it will be located in C:\Program Files\Casetrack - on a
network, it will be located on your server, in a directory chosen by whoever
installed it. Just make sure this file is included as part of your routine
overnight backup.
My What?
If you are storing important data on a computer, you should be creating
backups at least daily. This is just standard practice; nothing to do
with CASE*track, of course. Ideally you should have a file-server
based network, with a tape drive or similar installed in the server, and a
backup program scheduled to run every night; just as importantly, you should
have a designated person whose job it is to change the tape, and rotate the
tapes off-site. Really you should have a logbook signed off every time this is
done.
The point of a file-server from this perspective is that all your important
files are on one machine, in one carefully organised directory structure - this
is then much easier to back up. If you have a peer-to-peer network, designate
one workstation as the "file-server", and try to locate all your data on that,
again together with the backup device.
If you are running CASE*track on a stand-alone machine, then
manually copying the ct.mdb file to a Zip drive or CD-RW disk (InCD which comes
with Nero, is good for this) is pretty basic, but sufficient. You should still
rotate a set of eg ten disks so that you are not overwriting the previous
night's backup.
The backup and restore feature built in to DCU just copies/restores the
ct.mdb file to a selected location; it's aware of the CASE*track 'Location'
setting, but otherwise it's just the same as a manual copy.
I occasionally receive support calls along the lines of "Our PC's hard disk
has totally crashed and we can't retrieve any data. Can you fix CASE*track
for us?" To which I can only reply - "Yes. Re-install CASE*track onto
a new machine then restore your database from your backup." Sometimes this
reply is followed by a long, awkward, silence.
A. To minimise the number of passwords everyone has to remember,
CASE*track will examine the machine on startup and determine if a valid
network username has already been entered - that is, the user must have logged
into the network with a valid username and password, or, on a stand-alone
machine, logged onto Windows
with a valid username and password. If this is so, CASE*track
will accept this as sufficient proof that the user is genuine.
If not, a dialog box appears to allow you to enter a CASE*track
username. Only early versions of Windows can be configured to be so totally
stand-alone that this happens, however.
Sometimes on stand-alone systems or peer-to-peer networks, machines
will be configured to login automatically and invisibly with a
default username. This default username will typically be
something like 'DEFAULT' or 'NEW USER' or 'OEM USER' - though
we've even come across '.' - a single full-stop.
When CASE*track starts, it will find this username and assuming it
doesn't match its list of known users, will display the above message, with the
name it has found within the square brackets.
The easiest remedy is to just enter the default username into the CASE*track
user list (DCU | Maintenance | Users.)
Alternatively, set up your machine so that you log in to Windows when the
machine starts with a more meaningful username, and add that name to
CASE*track instead. This isn't as easy as it ought to be, however. < br />
Although XP apparently makes it easy to change your username, in
actual fact it only aliases your new name over the top of the old
one - internal to Windows you're still using the old name, and
therefore CASE*track will still pick up the old name.
(Similarly the directory for 'My Documents' retains the original
name, and so on.) Thus in order to successfully get a new user
name, you actually have to create a whole new account. Depending on
your set up, this may mean a whole lot of re-installing programs,
moving email folders etc etc. Thus we strongly recommend you set up
your network from day 1 with proper unique usernames, passwords, and
machine names etc, even if it's just peer-to-peer. (and even if
you're not using CASE*track - it's still better practice)
A. No. We're currently developing CASE*track 2.10 and 3.0 on
Vista
For completeness, we've left in the following FAQ's from earlier versions of
the page:
Q. Any XP issues?
A. Not really - CASE*track is developed on a Windows XP
system, and many of the Microsoft components that need to be installed on pre -
Win2K systems as part of the CASE*track install process are already
present in Windows 2000 and XP.
However, Microsoft have misleadingly mixed up the names of their operating
systems. Windows 2000 sounds like it follows on from Windows 95 and 98,
whereas in fact it is actually Windows NT 5.0 - and was known as exactly that
until very late in its production. Windows Millennium Edition is the next
version of the 9x family. So, logically Windows ME should have been called
Windows 2000 (following on from 98) while 2000 should've been left as NT5.0
In fact, internally, Windows 2000 is identified as NT5.0, whilst XP is
identified as NT5.1
Why did they do this?
Well, it's been a long term goal of Microsoft to merge the two operating
system families - the DOS - based 9x family, and the New Technology NT family -
into 'one Windows for all.' They'd like to drop the 9x Windows as soon as they
can get away with it, so perhaps their thinking was that moving as many users as
possible to NT5 would be easier if it weren't called NT5 (NT = scary and
technical). With XP, this goal (which they've been talking about since Windows
95) has finally been reached - there's no more 9x family Windows after ME, and
XP Home is as much NT based as XP Professional.
Why are you telling me all this?
This digression is just by way of background to the following - Windows 2000
has a much stricter security model than you're used to with Windows 95 or 98.
In particular, you know that kind-of pointless dialog box when you start
Windows, that asks for a user name and password, but lets you just hit "Escape"
? Well, you can't do that on Windows 2000. Each machine has its own set of
users, passwords, and permissions.
Look, can we just get to the point?
OK - when you install CASE*track on a Windows 2000 machine you may find
that, logged in as a user, you do not have the appropriate permission to access
the CASE*track directory on 'your own' machine.
To install CASE*track, you must be logged in to the machine as an
administrator. ( There's a similar situation with NT workstation - an
'ordinary' user does not have permissions to switch the printer to landscape
mode.) However, note that because of the way CASE*track uses the
registry, the settings you make with DCU, including the database location, are
stored as part of the user profile - hence you must be logged in as the
proposed user
to set the location etc.
We recommend that you make the target user a member of administrators
group, install CASE*track, then if required, demote the user again,
rather than logging on via a separate administrator account.
Q. After installing then un-installing EIS 2 CASE*track tells me
MSCOMCTL.OCX is missing - how can I fix this?
A. We have had reports that uninstalling EIS 2 erroneously removes a
couple of shared components from Windows - both this file, and also
COMDLG32.OCX. However, you should find that if you can locate them on another
computer and copy them into the Windows\system directory, CASE*track
will work once more. Other ways to obtain the files are (i) open the .cab file
on your CASE*track CD using Winzip (ii) download it from our
'Downloads' page.
The version you need is dated 13/05/99, size 1040 kb, version 6.00.8498
Better still, if you are reading this before un-installing EIS 2, copy
both files from your windows\system directory to another directory, do the
un-install, then restore the files.
What's my windows\system directory?
On Win9x,it's normally C:\windows\system; on NT/2000, C:\winnt\system32
I've done that, and CASE*track still doesn't work - what now?
You can re-install CASE*track from the original CD. On a
stand-alone machine, BACK UP YOUR DATABASE FIRST because re-installing will
overwrite your database with a new, empty one - or at the least, re-name the
ct.mdb file to something else.
Then,
- re-install from your CD
- upgrade the program to the latest version using your latest upgrade disk -
respond 'No' to 'OK to upgrade database?', 'Yes' to 'OK to upgrade program?'
Alternatively, you can 're-register' the ocx file
How do I do that?
- Download regsvr32.exe from our downloads page.
- Move it to your windows\system directory
- Open a DOS window (or 'Command prompt' on NT/2000)
- Go to the windows\system directory
- Run the following command:
regsvr32 mscomctl.ocx
- You should get a dialog box saying "DllRegisterServer in mscomctl.ocx
succeeded"
- Repeat the above procedure with COMDLG32.OCX
We understand that the CABnet helpdesk are now aware of this issue and can
assist.
Update:
It appears that installation of the latest release of EIS 2 uninstalls
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) which is also used by CASE*track.
On Windows 2000, MDAC 2.5 is a built-in part of the operating system, and
Windows prevents it from being removed. On earlier platforms, you will receive
a 'Class not registered' error on startup if MDAC has been removed. To restore
MDAC and repair your CASE*track installation, locate the file
mdac_typ.exe on your original CASE*track CD, and run it. This
will re-install MDAC.
Q. When CASE*track starts up I receive a dialog box telling me my
date settings are incorrect - what should I do?
A. Open your Windows control panel (start button, settings, control
panel) and click the 'regional settings' (globe) icon.
Check the Short Date Format is set to dd/MM/yyyy
Notes:
1. Check the year is FOUR y's and the sections are separated by '/'
2. You may have to type in two extra y's - this format does not appear in the
drop-down.
3. On a Windows 98 machine, the 'swing date' should be set to 1930
4. If you type dates into Casetrack, you must use the above date
format.
Q. I Have tried to change the date settings as
recommended, but I get an error message "One or more of the
characters you typed in this field are invalid. Try typing different
characters." from the Windows control panel.
A. This isn't a CASE*track issue at all, of course, but it crops up
from time to time, so we decided to mention it here anyway.
According to
Microsoft document Q250449, this problem is caused by a missing
registry entry.
If you are comfortable with editing the registry,
locate the above document on the Microsoft website and make the
appropriate changes.
Q. On attempting to install DCOM I get a message saying a later version of
DCOM is already installed - what should I do?
A. This typically occurs when the machine has Office 2000
installed, or is running Windows 98, Second Edition. In this situation you can
click OK to remove the message dialog then skip installing DCOM from the
CASE*track CD. The existing, later version of DCOM works fine. You will get a
similar message if installing on an NT/Win2000 machine, since DCOM is built in
to NT already. Again, skip this step from the installation process.
Q. I get a message that says "This application requires a screen resolution
of at least 800 x 600" on startup.
A. CASE*track was designed to be used on a PC with a monitor
resolution of at least SVGA standard ie 800 x 600.
It just isn't possible to display enough information at a lower
resolution, and most PC's in use today will support SVGA.
When CASE*track starts it will examine the screen
resolution and display this message if it doesn't meet this minimum standard. If
your monitor is currently only working at 640 x 480, VGA standard, look in the
control panel and select the 'Display' icon. Although the details here depend on
the video card installed in the machine, you should find you can set the
resolution to at least 800 x 600. You should also try to set a refresh rate
(vertical refresh) of 72Hz. - Any lower than this will result in a flickering
display, while often settings much above this are not supported by lower spec
monitors.
Personally I recommend as big a monitor, and as high a resolution,
as your budget can stand - not just for CASE*track, but for
just about anything you do on your PC. Once you've seen how much of
a document you can see running Word at 1600 x 1200 on a 21in
monitor, you won't be happy with SVGA.
See also the reply to the question "What are the requirements to run
CASE*track?"