gHacks technology news » bootstrapper http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:46:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 MSI or EXE Setuphttp://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/23/msi-or-exe-setup/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/23/msi-or-exe-setup/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:47:10 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/23/msi-or-exe-setup/ Some software programs are unpacked to both an msi ans exe setup file. If you are a end user you might wonder which to execute to install the application properly. Chance is that you tried both ways at least once and noticed that clicking the msi or the exe setup file would install the application properly. The setup.exe that you encounter in lots of software distributions is called a bootstrapper. This setup.exe file will check if the computer system is capable of running the software program; If it is it will initiate msiexec.exe which will launch the installation using the msi file.

Users who double-click on the msi file directly will also install the application but with the possibility that it will not run properly on the computer system. Take a computer program that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 for example. If the user has an older version of the framework installed setup.exe will download the files needed and launch the installation of the compatible framework and launch the installation using the msi file afterwards.

If the user installs using the msi file the installation will go through without problems but might experience an application crash or warning message while starting the application. It is therefor recommend on end user systems to always install applications using the setup.exe file if both a setup.exe and xyz.msi are available after unpacking the software program.

setup ms exe

There are even some msi setup files out there that will not perform the installation upon execution but request an installation using the setup.exe file instead to ensure that all necessary components are installed.

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