How to install
The general procedure, and the five faults that account for nearly every failed installation.
Every release page carries steps written for that package, and those take priority over anything here. This page covers the general procedure, which is the same for almost everything in the library, along with the things that go wrong often enough to be worth explaining once properly.
Before you extract anything
Check the size
Compare the downloaded file against the size on the release page. The overwhelming majority of failed extractions are truncated downloads rather than bad packages, and this check takes a second.
Switch protection off
Real time protection has to come off before extraction, not after. Scanners quarantine parts of a package silently while it is being unpacked, which produces an extraction that appears to finish and then fails at setup for no visible reason.
Extract to a short path
Somewhere like C:\Setup. Deeply nested folders with long names hit path length limits inside installers that were written before anyone worried about that, and the failure message when it happens is never helpful.
Running the installer
Run setup as administrator every time, even on an account that already has administrative rights, because some installers behave differently when they are elevated properly. Let the process finish completely before opening anything, including the program itself. Interrupting an installation halfway through to see whether it works is the single most common cause of a broken install.
Where a package includes a separate step at the end, apply it before the first launch unless the page says otherwise. Programs that check their licence state on first run and store the answer are much harder to correct afterwards than they are to set up correctly the first time.
First launch
Decline any sign in prompt. Do not connect an account. If a page mentions blocking the executable in the firewall, that is worth doing, and Windows Defender Firewall handles it through an outbound rule without any additional software.
Once the program opens and behaves, turn your antivirus back on. If it immediately objects to the installation folder, add an exclusion for that folder rather than leaving protection off. A machine without a scanner is a much larger problem than anything on this site solves.
When something goes wrong
- Extraction fails at the same point twice. The download is incomplete or the mirror has a problem. Try another mirror before anything else.
- Setup starts and closes immediately. Protection is still running, or a component of the package was quarantined during extraction. Extract again with the scanner fully off.
- The program opens with features missing. The installation was interrupted, or an existing older version is conflicting. Remove the old one properly and install again.
- The licence state resets after a Windows update. Run the same step from the package again. A full reinstall is not needed.
- An error mentions a missing runtime. Install the standard Visual C++ redistributable set from Microsoft, which several of these applications assume is already present.
Uninstalling cleanly
Use the uninstaller in Windows settings rather than deleting the program folder. Applications from the large suites in particular leave shared components behind, and removing the folder by hand leaves a registry state that stops the next installation from working. Where a developer publishes a cleaner utility, run that afterwards.