weird persistence behavior in Robot C 4.52 after install on one PC

VEX V5 Technical Support UNOFFICIAL Tech Support
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I wanted this in the open discussion thread Sorry for the duplicate post but this Forum seems so different than the old version.

Recently our team upgraded to Robot C 4.52 and we acquired a team license bundle as we have a summer camp next week and plan to include programming in this years program. As we went about D/L and trying Robot C 4.52 and eventually ‘activating’ it we ran across some weird behavior but it seems to have a simple workaround (for part of our problem).

For most of our PC’s which are a mix of Windows 7 and 8, we were able to install and the program worked as expected. but for the ‘team’ laptop which has an ADMIN account and a regular user account, although we were able to install successfully under the team account we were not able to set all defaults and have them stick from run to run (closing Robot C and re-opening). Specifically the platform would always default to Vex IQ vs. staying switched to Cortex. I did not observe this behavior on any other PC. and when I finally got the license info I tried applying it on that PC and although it initially activated, once I shut down Robot C & re-opened it I was back to a trial license state. I’ve contacted Tech support and I am working through them to get the license issue resolved because the Robomatter license serve believe this laptop has an active license.

I began to suspect the issue with settings not being saved should be solved before trying another ‘activation’ so After some experiments I finally logged in as MENTOR (our team admin account) and when I started Robot C it re-set the trial license to 10 days and allowed saving all preferences.

I logged back into the team account and the trial license was reset back to 10 days (had been 4 days left) and I can now switch between Cortex and Vex IQ and the setting sticks after closing Robot C. Interestingly things like 'display splash screen, and menu level (we always use super user) were persisting all the time.

So if you have weird persistence behavior under a trial run of Robot C you might want to sort that out prior to activating it when you buy it.

Although I went through the same sequence of events on another laptop installing under a non admin account (asked for escalated privileges as before) and running the trial and then changing settings and I did not see any issues. One difference is the team laptop runs Windows 8 and my second attempt was on a windows 7 laptop.

Will post again if anything significant comes up in my Tech Support resolution.

This is probably just a Windows fluke.

Cheers - Kb

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Kevin

That sounds like some sort of problem with writing to the windows registry (where all user preferences are saved). Probably best to work with tech support on this one.

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Problem solved.

The preferences worked after 1 time opening Robot C as an Admin.

The License Key needs to be applied when running Robot-C as Admin.

In future if you can it would be great to warn / refuse to try to activate unless running as admin if that is required.

I was able to deactivate the ‘seat’ on the website and re-activate.

Thanks for all the help and I’m looking forward to using the new features in 4.52

Kb

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Just a note, RobotC always defaults to VEXIQ upon deactivation/reactivation of a license. We only have a single license (allows two installs), so we bounce back and forth between two pc’s in our practice lab and a laptop during practices/competitions. Each time we deactivate and reactivate we have to switch the setting back to “Cortex”.

Not a big deal, but it would seem more people using RobotC are Cortex users…perhaps that default should be the other way around?

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You don’t need to deactivate a RobotC license to use it on another computer. A single license is fine if you only run RobotC on one computer at a time.

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Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach the high schoolers how to change the settings than to teach the middle schoolers?

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Not quite correct. You can have RobotC activated on 2 computers at one time with a single license. It does not check for activation each time you load the program.

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Good point, hadn’t thought about that.

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Really? Does it only check before compiling?

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As far as I know it only checks the very first time that you activate it. Once you do that it will no longer be in trial mode and it will not “check” for registration at all anymore unless you deactivate it manually and need to reactivate it.

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