4 months ago, I installed Liquid 7 (upgrade, 7.2, build 4296) on my desktop PC without problems. It works fine since.

Now I have installed the software on my new laptop in order to be able to continue editing my videos while travelling. The installation worked fine, but now the program refuses to start. A double click on the shortcut and also on the actual 'edition.exe' file (in the program folder under AVID Liquid 7) doesn't do anything but displaying a short hourglass icon of the mouse pointer. It seems that something blocks the program from starting.

I have deinstalled and reinstalled several times, used the upgrade patch, disabled my firewall, cleaned the registry with CCleaner and Easyclean, applied the latest pinnacle patch for DX10 grafic cards, ... the result remains the same.

Currently, I can see 2 possible reasons for this issue:

1. On my desktop I had my old Edition 5 installed before I installed Liquid 7. On the laptop I installed Liquid 7 directly. Should I try to first install Edition 5 on the laptop as well?

2. The problem might somehow be caused by my laptop's Win XP Pro installation: I have manually downgraded my new Dell XPS 1530 from Vista to XP. All my other software runs fine under the new system. If possible, I'd like to avoid a re-install of XP as this is quite a procedure without a recovery CD (Dell doesn't support XP on the laptop anymore).

So far, I haven't found any helpful information about this on the web. Could anyone please help me?  

Hi Jochen and welcome to the forum.

I think that you gave the answer yourself, a manipulated os is not a nice thing for Liquid to work together with.

So, running Liquid on a clean install of XP or Vista is your only choice I think.

As Tomas (mjolnarn) said, it is best to run Liquid on a clean install of the OS.  Liquid runs best on a clean Win XP, but the next best is a clean Vista.  Since Dell does not support XP, maybe reverting to a clean Vista might be the simplest solution.

Thanks a lot for your replies, guys. I agree that a clean XP is a key requirement.

Actually, I do consider my XP to be very clean as it was played on from scratch onto a freshly formatted HDD just over a week ago. By a 'manual' installation I just meant that I had to install all the hardware drivers one by one, but they were taken from a reliable source and work perfectly well so far. So there isn't all that much room for 'unclean' things i.e. viruses, trojans or even a lot of registry baggage or the like.

Anyways, I was just wondering whether anybody had met similar problems (no start after a no problem installation) and whether there might be anything else I could try. For instance, are there known issues with third party firewalls (I use Comodo Pro)?

 
Thanks again for taking the time.

Jochen 

Jochen:

 For instance, are there known issues with third party firewalls (I use Comodo Pro)?

Jochen 

I know nothing about Comodo Pro, but try disabling the firewall completely to see if that makes a difference.  By the way, did you remember to set exemptions in the firewall for Liquid's render engine as per the installation instructions?

Jochen:

Anyways, I was just wondering whether anybody had met similar problems (no start after a no problem installation) and whether there might be anything else I could try. For instance, are there known issues with third party firewalls (I use Comodo Pro)?

Jochen, with a clean install of your os, I mean just that, start with only the apps brought together with your os install disc and then install Liquid, after that, you can begin to test what apps works and won´t work on your system.

Someone correct me on this if I am mistaken, but I seem to remember an issue of Liquid licenses only good on one machine?  If that is the case, it might account for the issues Jochen is encountering.

Denny

Great forum, thanks for all thoughts and suggestions.

- A fresh install of Win XP is my last option - I'd like to be as sure as possible that I don't invest those hours in vain.

- Liquid is listed as exception in my Windows firewall, though I couldn't find an extra entry for the render engine. My documentation doesn't say anything about this.

- Thanks for the hint with the license. Hadn't crossed my mind so far. I had hoped that license allows installation on a second personal PC (laptop) but maybe this is too optimistic? Anyways, I agree that in my case this doesn't seem to be the issue that stops Liquid from starting. But in case I should manage to get the software going, Demo-Mode wouldn't do me much good. Can anybody confirm that - legally - I can't install Liquid on a 2nd PC?

 Thanks so much. Jochen
 

You can install Liquid on two computers, but you can't legaly use both installations simultaneously.  Many here have Liquid on their editing machine and on a laptop for field use, the same as what you are trying to do.  The Demo mode kicks in if you have a single license and try to use two installations simultaneously on a network.

The firewall exceptions are mentioned in several posts (by LewS), although I don't have the exact links (you could do a forum search).  If I remember correctly, there are two files that have to be listed in the firewall exceptions.

Thanks for this confirmation, VE7AXO. As you are saying, I don't intend to use Liquid on both machines simultaneously.

I checked my firewall again and found that the 'Render Manager'  is actually listed as exception (missed it the first time). This seems to confirm that my no-start problem is not caused by the firewall.

What next? Is there anything else I could do except a total reinstall of Windows? 

Have you tried reinstalling Liquid over itself?

No, I haven't tried that yet. Interesting thought. Will do and let you know.

Just tried to install Liquid 7 over the existing installation (with 3rd party firewall disabled). As before: Installation works fine, but then the program doesn't start. It's frustrating...

My guess is that Liquid will not run on this system. Most laptops are suitable for Liquid. Do you know anything about the video system on this unit? Does it share memory with the main memory??

(sorry for the delayed response, I am in the GMT+1 time zone here in Germany) 

The XPS series of Dell is known for its excellent graphic and game performance. As said earlier, they are only made available with Vista (but this is a strategic rather than technical decision). My XPS 1530 has a NVidia 8600m GT video card, which seems to belong to the DX10-capable systems. Unfortunately, Liquid's recently released DX10 patch didn't solve my problem.

According to this review <http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-8600M-GT.3986.0.html> this card doesn't share memory. This what they say about the technical side (not sure if of any significance):
The 8600M series is one of the first-laptop-GPUs, which support DirectX 10 and accelerate the H.264-decoding of HD-movies.
The particularity of this video card are the "Unified Shader". Pixel- and vertex-shaders do not exist any more but 32 of the so called stream processors do the graphic work (which up to now pixel- and vertex shaders did).
The memory clock speed depends on the used memory: 400 MHz for GDDR2 memory and 700 Mhz for GDDR3 (which is noticeable faster).The integrated PureVideo engine is one of the advantages of the 8600M GT. It supports (HD) encoding of H.264, VC-1, MPEG2, and WMV9 video content. Compared to the slower 8600M GS (and 8400M series) the 8600M GT supports a few more video features

Does this give you any clues as to general knockout criteria for Liquid on this notebook?

As advised I ran the check3D application. Without the new DX10 patch it returned something like 'serious errors have occurred'. After installing the Avid DX10 patch for Liquid the result was better but still not completely ok:

Driver Qualification: newer than qualified

General features:Overall rating: 0.54 ...

System validation: failures have occurred 

Does this sound as if the video card is not compatible? Is the system simply 'too new' for Liquid 7?

Any other comments or ideas before I have to give it my last shot i.e. reinstall XP from scratch?