FM 8 upgrade woes: some solutions

[Shell, Robert]

Dear Emily:
my commiserations. My rig: Vista Professional with 4 gigs ram.

I converted to FM 8 after Vista upgrade and had quite a few of the problems 
you mention. It took me a week to sort out.  I too missed my Xmas market. I 
too was misled by a page number, but there was nothing wrong with the page, 
although the error message was consistent.

Some lessons I learnt

1. Never convert to a new version of anything under deadline.

2. Never test any Adobe product with "Save as .pdf". "Save as .pdf" seems to 
work only with a single file. Always go for the postscript route. Goodness 
knows why Adobe called their printer "pdf converter" instead of "postscript 
converter", however, I was again taken in. This particular problem goes back 
to the days of PageMaker. I regard Adobe as a top of the line corporation 
and I am sure they will sort it out, but when? .... I would love to know how 
many person hours are lost globally on this wonderful program's output 
stage, but I digress

2. The FM 8 trial came with a partial distiller which seem to hang around 
even after the trial was removed.

3. There are three major FM 8 patches which have to be installed. The last 
one was difficult and had to be done twice. Go to the update window and keep 
on updating until all is updated.

4. After the three patch update (which cleaned out my ADSL monthly account), 
I inserted the FM8 CD and did a "repair" ; sounds like voodoo, but that was 
the thing that worked. The page problem disappeared.

p.s. If you have Vista and a spare flashdrive, make use of Vista's 
superfetch procedure: uses the flashdrive as extra memory. Works fine with 
FM8 and distiller.



Robert Shell