Today I got a question from one of our users. As you might know it is often hard to imagine such questions for someone developing software, since developing naturally means you are very familiar with the system for which you write the software.
Therefore I am grateful for any hints what may be wrong with our software or where to add a hint how to use this or that. Here is the question:
This is on a Windows 98 […].
When I would try to open the program I would get a message that the file was too large for Notepad and would I like to open it with Wordpad. Responding YES I get pages of what looks like programing language.
This looks like the user downloaded the ZIP archive and does not have the appropriate software installed to uncompress it. For this case I highly recommend 7-Zip, which does a good job for compression and decompression. If you wonder, 7-Zip was also used to create the archives which can be downloaded from the WinDirStat website. Installing this program or any other packer/unpacker capable of handling the ZIP file format (such as WinRAR) should give you a new menu item when right-clicking the downloaded ZIP-file. Use this menu item to “unpack”, “uncompress” or “decompress” the file (whatever term is used in your packer/unpacker software).
As an alternative I can also recommend you download our installer. It will handle most things for you. Only disadvantage for now, we don’t have localized versions available for the installer – only English is supported by now.
There may be just another possibility to interpret the above question. It could be, that the user really downloaded the source of WinDirStat and therefore wonders how to execute this file. If that’s the case, download one of the executables as archive or installer and try again with this file. You can delete the old file then. To check whether you downloaded the source package, just inspect the file name of the downloaded file. If it contains the text “src“, it is surely the source code. All the above applies only if you did not change the file name while downloading, of course.
// Oliver