A silly quirk with the Act Installer

[Buffalo_Steve]

Hi, this message is more for the dev team & ACCs but I do not have access to that board.

This morning I had to install v17.1 Pro on a customer's XP machine.  This was a desktop machine and did not need SQL.

After selecting the custom install option and proceeding next, the Act installer performs a "Checking SQL Server Status" stage.  At this point, it errored out and told me that SQL 2014 is not supported on XP.

That's just fine, because I did not intend to install SQL Server anyway.  

The installation force quits there.  Never even get to the option to skip the install; it does a check for SQL server compatibility before ever even getting the choice of skipping SQL.

The solution was to install v17.0 which used 2008, skip the SQL install in the custom installer there, and then apply SP1 manually.

Just reporting this issue to help anyone else along -- and maybe add my two cents that the installer should give you the option to skip the SQL server install BEFORE checking to make sure that it is compatible with your OS.

(and, yes, btw I did recommend that the customer upgrade off of XP.  What can you do?)

[Buffalo_Steve]

quick afterthought - it is also for this reason with SQL server 2014, that Windows XP should probably be removed from the Act v18 compatibility listing. You can't get v17.1 or above v18 to install cleanly on an XP machine, with or without SQL. Not without first installing an earlier version of SQL even when not necessary.

[Steven_Jackson]

Hi Stephen, thanks very much for your feedback, I'll pass your comments along to our developers for consideration going forward.

Just a quick note on the system requirements though, if you have a look at:

http://www.act.com/products/system/v18/pro

XP is listed, but there is an asterisk next to it that advises it can be used for upgrades only (as SQL 2008 would already be installed).

[Buffalo_Steve]

Ah, I see -- thanks!

[chrisbunyan]

You can also hide the Dependencies folder as i had this when trying to installing on Vista when you are not needing to install SQL. This also saves having to apply the service pack after

Also you need to make sure that the prerequisites are installed before hiding the Dependencies folder I.E. Microsoft .Net 4