Next, curious how to do the installation by cutting corners as some of you with little affection for PCs might want to do too, I chose to download  the “GUI 3.11 executable only” option, hoping to have a ready to run program in mere minutes, as opposed to going through an installation procedure. The download of the zip file “uTrace_v3p11_10_12_2014_exe.zip went okay, as did the unzipping on my local hard disk. However on running the .exe file I was again greeted by an error report, this time from the uTracer installer:

In a paragraph under the download options, Ronald Dekker supplies advice on dealing with warnings on missing .ocx components like mscomm32.ocx and comdlg32.ocx. These are required he says for the PC/uTracer serial communication and the file browser respectively. Apparently they are on your PC if you use Visual Basic 6 along with a bunch of .dll files. The workaround is also given, basically as: use a wizard in the Visual Basic Package to complement all missing files and build a turnkey .cab (cabinet) file containing the .exe file along with all required.ocx and .dll files. I told my lab fellows about this hiccup and that some novice PC users might be confounded at this point. They answered: forget it, get the full installation package! Nonetheless, kudos to Ronald for providing the clues to the workaround to those insisting on running the executable-only variant.

Go this way

After this small detour into a bewildering world of driver, dll, ocx, zip and cab files that apparently keep PC software going, I retraced my steps and went back to the full download of uTracer GUI version 3.11. After downloading and unpacking the .zip file, I soon had on my hard disk — in a folder called “uTracer” — these three files:
 

In essence, the little setup.exe file will execute the script in setup.lst and wield the data in the big utracer_3p11.cab file. Again just out of curiosity and wanting to know where users might go wrong I opened setup.lst using Wordpad:
 


Indeed, a script, with, remarkably, a placeholder area at the end for advanced users to fill to their personal requirements. That area filled with ‘xxx…’ is not shown above.