Sorry for the delay, but with the exams at the university and everything I didn't have too much time to test the different betas released. These are the bugs found in RC1. I tested the program on my Windows98 SE computer.
The "Custom remove" feature doesn't work as it crashes the program. Half of the USER and SYS resources are "hijacked" in the process (they're simply gone). This also happens in all final versions of 1.5.1.x (except in the last version released, which I didn't check). In the betas, however, it worked with no problems.
Now this is funny. After trying two times more, with the resources mentioned reduced to almost nothing, the feature works! This is truly strange... So I checked with Regmon and Filemon from Sysinternals, had a hard time checking 30,000 lines in Regmon, and didn't find anything suspicious (at least for me, I'm not a Windows guru :)). The data related to the entry I selected was correctly found judging from the log, but it seems that Windows couldn't draw the "Custom remove" window (I didn't even touch the button to search for the entries).
The first crash may be related to USER32.DLL because the detailed information provided by the same Windows and by Dr. Watson put the blame on it. Dr. Watson reports the second crash to be produced by COMCTL32.DLL. Dr. Watson diagnoses that PowerTools caused a stack overflow (or buffer overflow, I can't remember the exact English term) in both files, which crashed the program. That's all the information I can provide, but I can't understand why it works with so little resources.
"Run Uninstaller" doesn't work for some programs, for example, with Exact Audio Copy, although the "Show more information" feature shows the Uninstall String. The funny thing is that Mp3tag uses the same installation engine (NSIS) and it reports the same information (well, not exactly the same), but the "Run Uninstaller" function works. The same thing could be said about VideoLAN.
The tool can't fetch the information for some of the programs that I have installed in the computer. This bug was also present on 1.5.1.x versions, but forgot to report it. It seems that programs using the NSIS installer give a hard time to PowerTools as most of them are not listed (7-Zip, BSplayer, foobar2000...). There are a few that got listed, like ffdshow or xplorer2. Maybe the single entries created by the installers in the "HKLM/Software" root creates some problems, as they have the same name that the uninstall entries, and the program gets confused or something.
Firefox also has the same problem (1.0 version, I didn't check with 1.5), the uninstall entry doesn't get listed and some of the HKLM and HKCU doesn't appear too. Although this case seems a bit more problematic as the entries are duplicated in the two root keys mentioned above.
Finally another uninstall entry isn't correctly listed. Its display name is "Simulador 8085" but it gets displayed only as "Simulador". I don't know which is causing this, since the entry in the registry is "DisplayName", like the one used by Inno Setup. Anyway, this is a minor problem since this program is almost a home-made program we use in the university to
simulate the 8085 processor.
Trying to remove an entry crashes the program, the problem is similar to the "Custom remove" one, it behaves exactly like that one. Also happens in 1.5.1.x version.
Past betas reported about 172 entries in the list, this Release Candidate only list 73 entries.
I'm wondering... Why can you edit the information about the different entries listed in the "Custom Uninstall" window?
The columns are in a messed order. You have to click in a colum to sort the entries correctly
The different information provided by the tool appears as N/A. I know that the memory and the page file usage information isn't reported by my version of Windows (at least not by the kernel), but I know that the "PID", the number of threads and the base priority are reported. At least, Process Explorer reports them.
Does the shell menu has to appear when you click on an empty space of the list?
When you run the program, and you select one entry, all fields in the right except "Process running" and "File size" remain empty. If you click another entry, then the empty fields appears as "N/A" (due to Win98 limited features :))
Why does the "Disable" option appears in the shell menu when you click the entry without selecting it first?
Enabling and disabling entries doesn't work as expected. You can disable an entry but you can't enable it again, since it's deleted from the registry and it seems that the function can't recreate the entry as well. No backups also, so...
Also, it should be noted that the tool doesn't detect the process status as good as it could be, since, for example, the program in charge of managing the tray icons (systray.exe) is running and its status is reported as NOT running.
Highlighting an entry corresponding to an already running process and then calling the shell menu or clicking in one of the menus of the top window make those menus remain on screen only a few seconds. Same thing happens if you call other windows from within this tool.
The "Execute" function doesn't seem to work.
In "New file" tab, the entries created by OpenOffice (1.1.2, didn't check with 2.0) don't get listed. I forgot to report this one too. In 1.5.0.x version it worked (I think). I also think that worked in 1.4.x
Pressing Ctrl+F1 gives an error about a missing help file "600.HLP". But the tab is loaded correctly. I confirm that this bug also happens on version 1.5.1.x, but I didn't notice it.
In the "Add/Remove" tab, the entries starting with a number aren't located at the top of the list, like they should be. Instead, they're in the middle of the entries starting with the "B" character. Clicking on the "Software" column to solve the problem only make it worse, since they get stranded along the list. In addition to this, the BSplayer entry isn't in its correct position at first, but clicking in the column like above put its entry in the correct place.
Removing an entry from the list and then cancelling the operation removes the item from the list, but fortunately, it doesn't remove it from the registry.
I think that the "Refresh current section" option doesn't work, but I'm not really sure since I don't know how it should work in first place.
Hotkeys conflict in here. The hotkeys for the first three tabs and for "Show main window", "Settings" and "Backup Tool" are the same. It was also present in 2005 version, so a very evident bug that got unnoticed under our noses.
Pressing F1 to display the handbook gives the same error as pressing Ctrl+F1, although the handbook is correctly displayed by Adobe Reader.
I entered the "Add/Remove" from the "Filetypes" tab and instead of only the "Age" and the "Software" columns, I got a third empty and untitled. Couldn't reproduce the bug again.
Subsequent runs in of this tool the same session doesn't show the Results window again, only on the first run. It doesn't happen all the time, but after launching some other tools in the interim, and even then, not always. When the results window doesn't show, the Registry cleaner window loses focus (the top bar appears grey).
PowerTools 2005 in agressive mode reports about 430 errors, 2006 only 136. Is this because of the security updates?
The comparing function is sloooowwww. So slow that sometimes the tool seems to hang. I swore it wasn't this slow in the betas. Worst of all, the threads working on this remain in memory even if you close the program. You've got to kill the process to put an end to its pain :). I have observed that this problem occurs after you do two compares (one after another) with the same snapshot in the same session of the program. Intercalating comparing works with different snapshots doesn't give any apparent problem.
The "Explore" and the "Search" functions in the snapshots window don't work.
After the first run (and if you have the window maximized), the window appears a bit out of the screen. And no, rerunning the program doesn't work. But minimizing it fixes the problem. The problem is not related to the resolution of the screen.
The "Export as .reg file" creates blank .reg files, they only include the "REGEDIT4" header.
It reports a registry with a size of 2,1 MB, but the RegistryDefrag tool bundled with TuneUp Utilities reports a registry of around 4,3 MB.
Maximizing and restoring the "Mass rename" window causes strange display effects in this window.
The "Simulate..." option of the "Mass rename" function doesn't work. I mean, the text files with the results are created in the Temp directory but you got no evidence in screen of this.
The "Merge" function doesn't merge the split files as expected, it doesn't take in account the numbering of the files and the reconstructed file is not the same as the original in its contents (they're not in the same order). Also, trying to merge a handful of files twice in a row hangs the threads taking care of this in some kind of infinite loop.
The "File Analyzer" still needs lots of work to guess the contents correctly. In particular, it has its problems detecting natural language and with this, the language used with text files populated with some ASCII art. Well, the language guessing gives problems even in pure text files, lots of N/A results.
The problem with the maximized window of the Registry Monitor appears here too.
Adding folders to the tool by drag & drop or by using the "Add directories" options doesn't calculate any information about the folder (size, number of files...)
The Empty" feature works... but very bad. It makes PowerTools go in a infinite loop. Filemon got 35,000 lines of activity in 3 seconds! :)
The "Wipe free space" function hangs the computer. After wiping all free space judging from the space counter of the tool, the time count freezes. I also tried doing the same in a diskette but after 10 minutes of wiping, I aborted the operation I aborted the operation, since it was clear that it was going nowhere. "Wipe all data" gives the same problems, but this only time I only tested it in a diskette, and I aborted the operation after 15 minutes. Fortunately, there are some good news. "Wipe all files and data structures" works well, maybe a bit slow, but there are no problems.
The key for the RunMRU.dat is wrong, since it has a bit too much HKEYs :) Removing one should put it to work again.
Registry entries don't get restored using the programs functions. You have to open the backups directory and combine the information by yourself. "Custom Restore" doesn't work either.
The "Show backed up registry entries" doesn't work. And yet another problem I didn't report.
Another problem I forgot to report has plagued the program since the earlier 1.5.x versions. When you click on the "Custom Restore" feature, and if you have the window completely maximized, most of the "Custom Restore" screen gets filled with a grey coloured surface. I don't know if I should put the blame on the program or on the drivers of my graphics card.
Pressing Ctrl+C to copy the backup structure launches the "Explore" command sometimes.
The search function doesn't seem to work here, even if you input the full name of the backup and using any of the four search methods.
RegEdit calling function don't work. I think I should get a work on weekends to buy a new computer and install XP already...
When you click "Check for updates" and you don't allow the program to connect, it shows the dialog anyway, although it seems that it doesn't make any connection.
Opening different tools in the same program session consumes a lot of resources, although all of them are released when you close PowerTools.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 doesn't seem to like the Excel97 file generated by the "Save list as..." function of PowerTools. Do we need some kind of filter for the function to work correctly?
Display problems in the first screen of the quick tutorial. The last line appears a bit cut down. Nothing serious.
Personally, I think that, although the new idea for the "Show" menu is great, maybe you could reuse the tools organization in PowerTools 2005, to avoid such long menu. I'm not talking about going back to that structure, but to put the registry tools in a submenu, the file tools in another, etc.
Maximizing the main window doesn't maximize it to "real" full screen. The window gets the maximum width possible with the different resolutions, but not the maximum height.
I have noticed that pressing the hotkey corresponding to the different tools call them from within any other tool. Is this normal?
A very annoying "bug" (because it's not exactly a bug) is that when tools are doing their job clicking on the Cancel or the Close button only closes the window, but it doesn't stop the job they're doing. Isn't there a way to achieve this?
Beta1 created a log of the memory leaks in the parent directory of PowerTools. Do we have to send that log to you?
Well, that's all. In my humble opinion, there are too many bugs for this to be a Release Candidate, but, hey, it's beta testers duty to find all the bugs for the programmers to squash them :). In spite of everything, the program is quite stable as always, and the new tools and the changes in the design seem superb. It only needs some serious fine tuning. Wish that some major vendors could say the same about the final versions of their programs ;)
