Photoshop Elements and Vista, Microsoft sucks!

I hope my fellow P.O.T.N. users will allow a rant. My old ( 2.5 yr ) computer went south and today I bought a new one with Microsoft's newest Vista windows. Now I find, my Photoshop Elements 4.0 IS NOT COMPATIBLE! I can't wait to find out what else isn't compatible. I was selling some things on ebay to fund my upgrade to CS3, and I had a link that stated that it would cost me $299.00. Now I don't have access to the link, and Adobe says it will cost me $599.00 to upgrade to CS3. NOW, I'm mad as hell and I say, DOWN WITH MICROSOFT, AND DOWN WITH ADOBE, AS WELL. These guys spend most of their research dollars searching the best ways to screw the consumer.

No they don't

Hello Don;

I have every sympathy with your predicament... but, in all fairness, the problem is not with Adobe as such...

Adobe is just one of hundreds of software developers who are having no-end of problem porting their software to Vista. It's a humungus and exceedingly complex beast... Probably way too complex for its own good!

It's one of the key reasons why I have been telling all I know NOT to upgrade to Vista for at least a year yet; but I understand you have little alternative if your PC falls over, because all new machines now come pre-installed with Vista...

However, there are still XP machines to be found, and, I believe (although I'm not 100% sure) that you can still install XP alongside Vista as an alternate operating system; but you would need to ensure you knew what you were doing to go down that route...

Good luck;

Cheers;

Lee

It's not Microsoft's fault that they're helping the consumers out by requesting the software development houses like Adobe should write stable, secure programs.

Microsoft has put guidelines like this in for a reason, and it means that you, as a consumer has a crash-free existance (as much as possible).

Since Elements 4.0 is now fairly old (I beleive that 5.0 is the latest version), it would make sense for you to upgrade to the latest vesion of that.

People might jump on the bandwagon and telling you to wait for a year or so until Vista is stablised. The real reason you might want to wait is for the other software houses to come in line with Vista.

Pete wrote in post #3589686
People might jump on the bandwagon and telling you to wait for a year or so until Vista is stablised. The real reason you might want to wait is for the other software houses to come in line with Vista.

Hi Pete;

BOTH of those scenarios are true!

Lee

Don Powell wrote in post #3583431
I hope my fellow P.O.T.N. users will allow a rant. My old ( 2.5 yr ) computer went south and today I bought a new one with Microsoft's newest Vista windows. Now I find, my Photoshop Elements 4.0 IS NOT COMPATIBLE! I can't wait to find out what else isn't compatible. I was selling some things on ebay to fund my upgrade to CS3, and I had a link that stated that it would cost me $299.00. Now I don't have access to the link, and Adobe says it will cost me $599.00 to upgrade to CS3. NOW, I'm mad as hell and I say, DOWN WITH MICROSOFT, AND DOWN WITH ADOBE, AS WELL. These guys spend most of their research dollars searching the best ways to screw the consumer.

What is the error message exactly, or is this a known/documented issue? - Can you run or install it in compatability mode - maybe you need to be in administrator mode to install it...

Have you looked on Google?? - not sure if this helps:

http://www.adobeforums​.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc45183

I am perplexed by the "I had a link that stated that it would cost me $299.00. Now I don't have access to the link," statement. You had an internet link to obviously somewhere other than Adobe. Your old computer dies and now you want to blame everyone because you can't remember it. I understand the therapy in doing a rant but I think that you just need to get on with life. Yeah it sucks sometimes.

I bought my new PC a couple of months ago and was able to get XP Pro and got the free upgrade coupon to Vista which I ordered and the CD is sitting on my desk. It will be awhile before I decide to install it. Some people have had great success with Vista while others have not. It seems to be the luck of the draw.

From the few times that I have seen Vista on others computers it seems very stable. Somewhere in this whole thing though there seems to have been a breakdown between Microsoft and the software developers. It seems odd to me that there is so much hue and cry about software packages not being compatible. It is almost like alot of the developers thought there product was going to port over to Vista alot easier than it has turned out to be.

I also have VISTA and found out that it doesn't matter if you are the administrator when you log in to your system, you need to right click on your icon and then click on Run As Administrator....Prosh​ow Gold and some photoshop plugins would not accept the serial numbers unless I ran cs3 as Administrator, then I can do what I want...No guarantee that is what is wrong with elements 4.0 but no harm in trying..it works for me but I have elements 5.0. It isn't Adobe's fault...welcome to the untested world of Bill Gates.

i think the $299.99 was an upgrade from cs2 and not the whole cs3 package

I want to thank all of you, well maybe almost all, for your replies.
In all fairness, I can't really blame Adobe for an outdated Elements 4 program, but Microsoft is another story. My computer died, all the computers I found had Vista.

It is very frustrating not to be able to load all my backed up documents from a Works 7.0 program to a Works 8.5 program. I tried some downloads. Microsoft wants $35.00 just to talk to me about it. I will call them Monday to try to purchase something to convert the files.

I was able to get my computer to boot for 5 minutes and retrieve my offer, yes from Adobe, to get the CS3 for $299.00. I hope the CS3, on Vista, will be trouble free.

Best wishes, Don

A friend of mine has been in IT for the past 20 years. He is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and has pitched MS products for years. He, along with many others, have jumped off the Microsoft ship because of Vista. The platform is questionable at best. The prediction is that MS is developing their own software as a fix to the incompatability issues Vista has. Now, that being said, computers are a touchy animal. That's why the package recovery software w/ every computer and have system restore points built in. Well, mainly because many people don't use computers properly.

I understand your frustration and have even had a couple issues with the file watcher in PSE5 and Vista, but once I got through those it now works just fine. I would check out the Adobe forums, I could swear I have seen people getting PSE4 working on Vista over there.

Best of luck.

Thank you for that information, Paul. I will check that out. Even though I have CS3 on order, it would be nice to have pse 4 while I become better on CS3.

asysin2leads wrote in post #3594273
The platform is questionable at best. The prediction is that MS is developing their own software as a fix to the incompatability issues Vista has. Now, that being said, computers are a touchy animal.

Microsoft long ago stopped developing operating systems and started developing application suites disguised as an operating system. I was running Netscape on Windows 95 long before Microsoft ever heard of the internet. Then all of a sudden (probably with Al Gore) Microsoft invented the Internet, and web browsers, and chat, and an whole bunch of other software that is not part of the operating system but bloatware. If Microsoft just put 10% of the effort they put into all this bloatware, the might get a good, stable operating system rather than trying to get it right every few years.

Email Bill Gates.

billg@microsoft.com

I did and my complaint was addressed very, very promptly. Doubtful that he even reads his email, but it got someone's attention.