Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Don't upgrade to PowerChute Personal Edition 3.0

If you're running Windows 7 or Vista and you have UAC enabled, don't upgrade to PowerChute Personal Edition 3.0. APC doesn't know how to properly program for Windows 7 and Vista. Their system tray application needs administrative rights, and so a UAC prompt will appear after every bootup or login. APC knows about this issue, and they suggest reducing your security settings as a workaround.

Administrative rights are requested by the executable's manifest. The manifest could be edited or even removed. However, that would probably cause problems. Just use an older version of PowerChute Personal Edition; it works fine.

7 comments:

Jeff said...

Any idea where you can still download the US Windows 7 version of 2.1.x? 2.1.2 seems to be China-only from the APC site.

3.0 is just terrible.

Boris Gjenero said...

I'm using 2.2, which can still be downloaded from APC. If you don't want to register on their site you can use bugmenot. Some older versions are also available from the APC FTP site.

Justin said...

Boris - I made the same mistake when I reformatted, 3.0 is buggy and doesn't work with my 5 yr old backup unit.

I too was running Personal Edition 2.2.0.0 before, but cannot seem to find the download. I looked at the FTP site, but they only have earlier editions. Any chance you could zip and email me your 2.2 version for Windows? Much appreciated!

Boris Gjenero said...

Yeah, APC seems to have removed that download. You can search for "PCPE_2.2_en-US.msi". Currently I can find it at http://download.sscwa.com:81/apps.utilities/apcc/PCPE_2.2_en-US.msi

The file is digitally signed by APC, so you can verify that it has not been tampered with.

Justin said...

Boris - That was exactly what I was looking for, my UPS is back up and running bug free! Many thanks for the link!

Cheers!

Unknown said...

PowerChute Personal Edition V3.0.2 works fine in Windows 7. It can be downloaded from http://www.apc.com/tools/download/index.cfm

Unknown said...

I use Powerchute PE 3.0.2 with Windows 7 64bit and it seems ok. Have tested the setup and and it hibernates my system when the bettery gets to the pre-determined level.

The one problem I have encountered is that as Powerchute runs as an application, it is not protecting a system left at the login screen. So if the system does a restart (for example) and then encounters a power outage, it doesn't hibernate.

An unlikely scenario, but worth mentioning. Other than configuring Windows to auto login (not ideal) is there a known work around?