Author

Steve Peregrine BEng Hons, Senior Technical Manager

Page Contents

Introduction

This page aims to help users:

• To run the WinCan VX installation package.

• To understand how WinCan VX is stored on a PC.

• To understand and use more advanced options if needed.

First Time Installation

If you have never installed WinCan VX before on your PC, then follow these steps to make your installation and understand the options available during the installer run:

Step	Action
1.	Navigate to www.wincan.com and download the Stable Release version (recommended) from the downloads page which you can get to by clicking on one of the Download buttons at the top of the page.
2.	The installation package will be downloaded to your PC as a zipped folder into the download file location specified in your browser options, but is usually the default Windows Download folder in most cases. Inside the zipped folder will be the WinCan installation file and the version release notes. You can choose to leave the files where they are or you can extract the files to a folder directory of your choice. Either option is Ok.
3.	Right-click on the installation package and select the option ‘Run As Administrator’ to launch the installer. Although you can also simply double-click the file without selecting the right-click option if you prefer, this very simple little trick juts might help you out later on, and there’s no harm in doing it anyway.
4.	If you are prompted with a Windows alert screen that describes a possible threat to your PC, click on the ‘More Information’ option and then select ‘Run Anyway’ at the bottom of the panel. If your anti-virus prompts you that there may be a risk attached to this file, then please take all steps necessary to trust and white-list the product so that it runs. The installer will start to run.
5.	The first pop up splash screen that you will see will be the welcome screen: Please read and understand the comments here, and although it is not really necessary to close all other applications while installing WinCan VX, it is nonetheless recommended good practice when installing any kind of software. Click the ‘next’ button.
6.	The next screen will be the software license agreement: You will notice that the ‘Next’ button is greyed out and unavailable until after you click the radio button to ‘agree’ to the terms and conditions. When you are happy with this, click the ‘Next’ button.
7.	On the next screen, you can select some more advanced options. It is not recommended to tick this ‘Advanced Network Setup’ box unless you have a very good and technical reason to do so. For the greatest majority of users, simply ignore this option and click the ‘Next’ button again. Valid reasons to select the advanced options include: Changing the default location of the program CDLAB directory (not recommended). Changing the default location of the public documents CDLAB folder (highly not recommended). You are setting up the software in a Citrix environment.
8.	Click ‘Next’ one more time on the summary screen and the installation will begin:
9.	Please wait patiently for the installer to complete all of its tasks when you will be presented with an option to ‘Finish’ the process. When it appears, click this button: The time taken to complete the process will depend on a number of variables, not least the speed and specification of the PC, and times will vary from PC to PC. Please do not attempt to kill the installation prematurely if you hope to have a solid working WinCan VX at the end.
10.	After the installation is complete, you can delete the original installation files if you wish and you will have 2 new shortcut launcher icons on your desktop, one for WinCan VX and one for CleverScan. If you are not using CleverScan, then you can also move this shortcut icon to the trash. This will not delete the software from your PC and it will remain installed to such a time that maybe you do need to use it, and then there is a launcher button inside WinCan VX anyway.

Folder Locations

For a regular installation as described above (recommended), all of the files used by WinCan VX are stored in these two folder directories:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\CDLAB

  • Contains all of the program file code.

• C:\Users\Public\Documents\CDLAB

  • Contains all of the files relating to the user preferences and experience.

In addition, we also have the following folder directory which contains the automatic backup files that WinCan VX creates each day on first launch:

• C:\Users\Public\Documents\VXBackup

Upgrading from an Older Version to a Newer Version

At this point, you may wish to consider some options and make a decision about how you wish to proceed with your update plan depending on what results you consider to be most appropriate.

Firstly, follow steps 1 and 2 in the previous section.

There are two available installation paths that you can follow, and there are pros and cons with each option as described here:

Overwrite Install

To follow this option, simply follow the remainder of the steps described above in the section First Time Installations until completion.

This will install the new version of WinCan VX over the top of the old version. During this process, there are some complex decisions (not to the user - these are automatic inside the installer) about which files are replaced during the overwrite and which ones are not.

• Pros:

  • The installation is easy.

  • All user settings, project list and participant information are retained in the new version.

• Cons:

  • You are creating a ‘hybrid’ application which may (very slim chance, but nonetheless possible) create some unexpected behaviours when running. If this happens, we would like to know about it to fix it for the future, so please contact your local service desk team.

Clean Install

This option requires a little bit more intervention and a few more mouse clicks, but will give you a clean ‘out-of-the-box’ installation of the new version of the software, while still retaining the old version, just in case you want to downgrade back to that version.

• Pros:

  • There will be no versioning issues created by a ‘hybrid’ installation.

• Cons:

  • Things like participant details and project lists etc will be empty at first launch of the new version, but rest assured, your project data is safe and has not been touched during the installation process. You can simply use the ‘Open Project’ button in the Projects ribbon to re-navigate to a project of your choice and open it on demand. Furthermore, you can use the ‘Backup and Restore’ tools in the Tools ribbon to retrieve things like your project list, OSD and camera setup etc from the last backup that was automatically made by the previous installed version.

As a worked example, let’s say that we have WinCan VX v7.5 installed on the PC and we wish to upgrade to WinCan VX v8.7 with a clean installation.

The version number of your current setup can be found by looking at the top centre of the WinCan VX user interface where you will see some text like WinCan VX (-PROD-) v1.2020.7.5 [Operator] - we would commonly refer to this simply as v7.5, and the ‘[Operator]’ part is the user type that you are currently logged into WinCan VX as.

The version number of the new version is written into the file name of the installation package, so if the file name is something like WinCanVXSetup_1_2020_8_7.exe then we can again see the common version number at the end of the file name, which would be v8.7 in this case.

To create the ‘Clean Installation’ of v8.7 in this case, first close WinCan VX and follow these two steps before running the installer as described in the section here at the top of this document:

• Navigate in Windows on your PC to C:\Program Files (x86) and rename the CDLAB folder to CDLAB_7_5

• Navigate in Windows on your PC to C:\Users\Public\Documents and rename the CDLAB folder to CDLAB_7_5

As described in the section Folder Locations above, we have no renamed the two folders that contain all of the WinCan VX data files, so your old installation will no longer work.

The last step is to simply run the installer again as described in the section First Time Installations, and these folders will be created as if they never existed so nothing will be overwritten and everything will be new.

Now you can launch your new version of WinCan VX.

The result will be two new CDLAB folders and you will still also have the old version safe and clearly labelled as to which version it was, so that you don’t forget.

Switching Versions

Let’s say we now want to switch back fro v8.7 to v7.5 for any reason. Please first call our global support teams before doing this, because the issue that you may be seeing might simply be that something has changed slightly in the new version, and you just need a little help to understand how it works now.

To do this, simply:

1. Rename the 2 CDLAB folders as described above in the section Folder Locations to CDLAB_8_7

2. Rename the 2 CDLAB_7_5 folders back to CDLAB

3. Relaunch WinCan VX from your favourite launcher icon.

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