I recently had to reformat the harddrive in my computer and am having trouble installing emplode. I've downloaded the installation file for beta 13 but whenever i try and open it, it just gives me the windows "open with" box aks me what program i want to open it with. I never had this problem before the reformat. Before, i just downloaded it and opened it and everything went fine. What am I doing wrong?

The file is a ZIP file. Did you unzip it? If not, get an unzipper program and install it.

Wow I feel really stupid now. I should have figured that out. I'm still trying to get everything back on my computer like before and one of the things i've forgotten to put back on is winzip. Thanks for the quick response.

Something I always do when I set up a new operating system is to turn off the annoying "hide file extensions" feature. Perhaps if you'd seen the ".zip" file extension, you would have known intuitively what to do. I hate it when the OS hides file extensions because I can't make those kinds of judgements.

YES... that is ALWAYS the first thing i do too. Show the file extensions!

What irritates me, is that I've got a pretty extensive list of crap I have to change the first time I install a new Microsoft OS...

... and with each new OS they release, the list gets bigger.

You know, I keep prodding my OS vendors (commercial Unices, mostly) to make smaller installs. But everyone keeps making it bigger and bigger.

For example, I just got through installing a Solaris 8 machine, and it provides a number of different install options, much like the Full, Standard, and Custom type install options provided by many Windows installers. Anyway, I installed the ``Core OS'' cluster, which is the most minimal of 5 possible options. Once it was done, I logged in and removed about half of the packages it installed.