Railmaster and windows 10

[Federico_Carminati]

Hello,

  sorry for reopening an old wound, but I looked at old threads on this subject and I cannot find a solution. I upgraded from Windows 8 pro to Windows 10 family by buying a copy of Windows. It is not possible to use the free upgrade from 8 Pro. Windows in its wisdom decided to wipe all applications during the installation and RailMaster went with them. After a long back and forth with support (average round trip time to answer a question 3 days!), my activation code was reset and I am now trying to activate RM. I have disable both the firewall and windows defender, and I have no other antivirus. I keep getting the message "Your key was not dowloaded correctly". I am of course running as administrator, both by setting the property on the RM.exe and also, to be on the safe side, explicitly running it as administrator. The only thing I can think of is that the directory is ReadOnly, and there is no way on Windows 10 to change this. I can of course de-select Read Only on the properties panel, but when I click OK or Apply and I go back and look at it, it is still there. I also tried to give full control to Everyone, but this does not help. I did not have an Administrator account enabled. I enabled it and I tried from there too... no help. Any help on this matter would be highly appreciated. I am trying since weeks and I am considerably frustrated. I have to say that my opinion of RM support has not been improved during this long fight. They answer erratically not not always to the point. Thanks in advance and best regards, 

 Federico Carminati

[Britannia Builder]

Hi Federico

I'm running Railmaster under Windows 10. I've just checked my Railmaster directory and it is marked as read-only like yours; I didn't have any trouble registering RM when I installed it, so that's probably not the cause of your problem. Sorry I can't help further.

 

Kind regards, John

[Britannia Builder]

Hi again Federico

 

Since my initial reply above I've Googled 'Windows 10 read only' and it does seem to cause a lot of people problems on upgrading. The read-only checkbox on the folder properties may be a red herring and it's the permissions on individual files in the folder that matter - my RM files are not marked read-only. There's a suggestion that using a different Windows username after upgrading can cause problems. I don't know which file RM is trying to update with the key - if RM support could clarify this, perhaps you could look at the permissions on that file.

 

Regards, John

[Federico_Carminati]

Dear John,

    Thanks a lot for looking into this. I have reinstalled the application with my new username, and from RM support they tell me my license number is reset, so this should look like a pristine new installation. I really hope they will chime in and provide me some help. I will check tonight if my files are read only. Best, 

[Federico_Carminati]

One thing that would help a lot would be an indication of where to find log files from RM, if any. This would help identifying more clearly the cause of the problem instead of trying blindly to shoot in the dark... Just  saying. Best regards

[Britannia Builder]

There is a file log.txt in the Railmaster folder which shows a very detailed record of my last session, so it might give some more detail on your licence problem.

 

Kind regards, John

[Federico_Carminati]

Brilliant... will check tonight. Thanks again! Best

[Fishmanoz]

The chances are at lest 95% the problem is your AV despite what you have done to try to eliminate that.

 

Go to the top locked thread in the RM forum to AC's excellent separate site and go through its full AV section and see how you go.

 

It isn't likely to be the read only thing.

[Augustus Caesar]

After being away for a couple of weeks and not being on here too much apart from brief looks I am gald to be back... :-)

 

@Frederico

I don't know why you believe Windows 10 would not upgrade from Windows 8 Pro with the free version. It does... trust me. I've done it for other folk in my line of business.

Anyway, there is NO way read only folders is a culprit for you not being able to get RM working properly on your system... regardless of how any installation went for RM or Windows itself.

When you install Windows 10 you are automatically an administrator upon its completion and there is no need to add another account. The only difference is that during installation of Windows 10 you are rather by slight of hand from Microsoft almost forced into completing the install in a way that suits them and when booting into Windows they have you logging in with a Microsoft Account. This should always be stopped and you should log in with a Local Account. This stops the need for an Internet connection every time you log in and stops MS attempting to have all your data saved to their servers. A local account keeps data on your machine and keeps it private to you.

This can, of course, be changed later on but you need to be aware of it... if you are and are already on a local account then fine.

 

As Fishy says take a look at my Help Site (at or near the top of this forum) and follow the instructions on there for your activation etc and how to tie up all the loose ends like anti virus software, firewall, ports, networks and much more. It's very comprehensive and if any of that fails come back and ask again what to do next.