hi everyone,


Just wanted to post a message here concerning running
Tonescape in Windows Vista.

The good news is that Tonescape is working fine
on my newest laptop (Toshiba Satellite A215-S5850)
in Windows Vista Home Premium. And it looks more
beautiful than ever!

But i have tried to install Tonescape on several
Vista machines for other people and have had problems.
It always installs fine, but then crashes when
trying to run. But installing it onto my own Vista
machine, Tonescape worked perfectly right "out of the box".

Most of the problems with Tonescape are because of
compatibility issues between different versions of
Microsoft's DirectX. But getting a Windows Update
in Vista can also actually break a working Tonescape
installation, as happened to me.

I brought my Toshiba laptop to the September MusicByComputers
meeting, and Tonescape mysteriously crashed on
trying to open it.

I say mysteriously because i have 4 (yep, four)
different linux distros on this machine and i use two
of them all the time, and never use Windows for
anything except Tonescape. I actually had not booted
into Windows since showing some things in Tonescape
at the August meeting.

I suspected that Vista had gotten an automatic update
which broke Tonescape, and apparently i was right.
After trying to uninstall and reinstall Tonescape
several times with different configurations and no success,
i finally decided that the only solution was to reinstall
a fresh factory version of Vista.

Luckily i didn't have to do that, because when i put
in the CD it asked me if i wanted to roll back to a
previous version of Vista, and Vista apparently keeps
a database of each change that is made to the system,
BACK TO A CERTAIN POINT.

The earliest version that i had available was from
August 31 2008, just before a Windows update. Then only
a few days after that the changes made were that i had
removed Tonescape, then the next one after that was the
new install of Tonescape.

So apparently the database goes back about 6 months,
and i was very lucky that there was still a version of
Vista in which Tonescape worked. So i was able to keep
all the settings and software i had on August 31 -- which,
since i haven't used Vista at all since then, means everything
-- and get Tonescape working again.

The caveat is that as soon as i restored to that version
of Vista, i turned off automatic Windows updates, which
means that i shouldn't go online with Vista anymore. So i
also turned off the automatic wireless.

So as long as i keep that version of Vista exactly as it is,
Tonescape will be working fine for me on the Toshiba.
I can show it off again at the March meeting.


-monz