Well actually my first post was supposed to be about first Israel Alt .NET un-conference, which I attended two days ago. However, while downloading the video I shot with my Canon PowerShot S3 IS, I encountered a problem…

So my friend and partner, Dan Barak, suggested me to use Canon’s ZoomBrowser EX software, instead of the default one, that comes with Windows XP. I thought naively that I will download and install the software in 5 minutes, and I am good to proceed with my original post. As you can guess that was not the case. The Canon’s web site is full of all kinds of ZoomBrowser updaters, which won’t install if you don’t have any previous version of it already installed. But of course, these geniuses at Canon didn’t think of providing some base installation. Pretty fast I found in Google a link to antique version 2.2 of ZoomBrowser, which of course won’t run on my XP machine for some reason. I searched the web and found a lot of people with a similar problem, obviously since Canon’s market share in digital cameras is pretty big 😦

Eventually I was lucky enough to stumble upon this post by Tom McGuire, who suggested a simple thing: the software wants a previous version, then give it a previous version. Tom provides a small reg file, which adds an empty record to the registry, as if you have ZoomBrowser installed. You can create such file by yourself, open new file named canon.reg and paste into it:

— Copy Below This Line —
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Canon\ZoomBrowser EX]
— Stop Copy Above This Line —

Pretty simple and genius, the exact type of solution we all like. I followed the steps and in 10 minutes I had the latest version of ZoomBrowser installed 🙂