Thanks all for your input on this issue. Meanwhile, I have gone the trial activation pack route since this is what tech support recommended (see also: Dafydd’s post, section T). To all lost souls, experiencing a similar delight, here is what I did (experience reported here is with Vista x64):
1) Contact Cyberlink tech support, requesting the trial activation pack (you need to send them proof of purchase)
2) Upon downloading the file “PDR_Trial_Pack.exe” from the link provided in the support mail (a 378 MB download) I followed
3) the Cyberlink instructions, that say “run the file to install software”, so I right-clicked, run as admin (just in case), which results in a rather confusing message thereafter “Warning: please install the trial pack” which I guess meant to now activate/upgrade the PD7 trial to the full version
4) So I right-clicked-run as admin PD7-activate and entered the key
5) PD7 asked for the trial activation pack (see above)- locate it on your drive
6) Voila- PD7 confirms it has upgraded to the PD7 Deluxe version (help-about confirms it is now version 7.0.2521, which I guess makes me a 2521 guinea pig). So far, I have not messed with registry entries (this is something that should not be part of a commercial product’s installation process, come on!), and hope that I do not have to do so.
One caveat though: Somewhere I read that it might be a good idea to disable UAC before installation, so I did. When I put it back on, I got a BSOD (illegal page fault), Vista kindly suggested an immediate startup repair and found the root cause and suggested to go back to an earlier restore point (which I declined): Bugcheck 50 (UAC related or PD7, who knows...). O well. So far everything seems to work, I had one PD7 crash in between, but so far, so good.
Bif reply: One more word to the versions/patch business: The full download “monster’ is build 2519 (the same as the patch that just came out), which I’ll keep if I have to reinstall the OS. Have not seen a 2521 patch yet, so I guess the trial folks are “early receivers”?
And: For the folks who are hoping PD7 is speeding up transcoding dramatically using CUDA: It does not. Transcoding a 1080p .mov to MPEG-4 mts is taking about 2x realtime on a quad-core w/ 8800GT GPU (80% load on all 4 cores tells the story).
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Feb 14. 2009 04:01