The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Let's try it:
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1716

My batch file looks like this: because I keep my catalogs inside "Catalogs" subfolder.

So, I did not get the honour for have suggested the portable version, despite all my work on promoting it and talking about it with the author? Maybe I shall suggest M$ Office in case it turns portable in the future?

Anyway, it is great to see it is finally up there.

For those who find it difficult to get the reg-file, maybe this can help.
1. Start Cathy and make the settings that you want.
2. Start and close Cathy again another 4-5 times, until the tips window disappear when you start the program.
3. Start a command window.
4. Write: 5. Write: 6. Copy the created file cathy.reg into the folder where cathy.exe is.
7. Open Cathy.reg in notepad or similar editor, and save in ascii format. Choose File > Save as... > Encoding: ANSI
8. Launch Cathy with: cathy.exe -ini cathy.reg for example by using a batch file or PStart, which you find in TPFC.

If you don't use any other programs from the same author you can replace point 5 with: This should leave you with no traces in the registry.

perwhis wrote:So, I did not get the honour for have suggested the portable version, despite all my work on promoting it and talking about it with the author? Maybe I shall suggest M$ Office in case it turns portable in the future?

I was always under the impression that this was somehow an unwritten forum rule: mentioning in the "Suggested by" field the person that really mentioned the app the first time. I did a forum search and that post was the first one I could find. Maybe Andrew could clarify this issue a bit. Ah...and don't worry, that field is easily modifiable.
First, let's hope it gets into the database.

No worries. It was mainly meant as a joke, and I'm anyway very ignorant when it comes to forums. My only goal is to try to make people notice what a great program Cathy is, with the hope that more people benefit from it. Keeping my fingers crossed it will be posted in TPFC.

I really like this app and want to believe it can be run portable, but it's just not happening.

I started Cathy with no parameters; it wrote it's settings to the registry.
Exported the reg key it created to the Cathy folder, then deleted the reg key.
Relaunched with the parameters -ini Cathy.reg; it created 'Cathy.ini' in the Windows folder.
Subsequent runs of Cathy verified read/write to 'Cathy.ini' in the Windows folder. (no reg entry)

Cathy is capable of read/write to it's own ini, just not in it's own folder.
Passing the parameter "-ini", "-ini Cathy.reg" or "-ini 'anything' " will create and read/write to Cathy.ini in the Windows folder.

Note: Vista will redirect any writes to the Windows folder to » 'C:\Users\Name\AppData\Local\VirtualStore'.

[Edit]
OK I figured what went wrong; I exported the Cathy reg key from the command window and it saved it as Unicode.
There are a couple of ways to save as ANSI:
Open Registry Editor > Export > Save as type > Win9x/NT4
Open Cathy.reg in notepad File > Save as... > Encoding: ANSI

Today I've hit Cathy's 65535 folders limit. Bummer...I can't catalog my HDD anymore.
It is an important limitation since drives are getting bigger and bigger these days. It's also true that Cathy was designed to catalog primarily CD's and DVD's.
Another problem I'm facing is when I try to update one of the catalogs of my external HDD (2 drives - 7 partitions); drives letters are always changing and Cathy doesn't support that. I have to recreate the entire catalogs.

There is one application out there that I like very much, but it is shareware. I'm this close of buying it. For me there is no free app out there comparable to Cathy or that other one (interface wise).
I just tried a bunch of them tonight and I'm now playing the last card: Jauntized version of Disk Explorer Professional.

Just sad...

Just tried to launch the newest 2.29 version of Cathy.
Although I have an up to date version of win7x64sp1, I was still missing 2 files: "mfc100.dll" and "msvcr100.dll".
They are part of the Visual C++ 2010 package that can be found here: x86 .


Edit: 2.29 version does not work for me; I get this error after the scanning, when the catalog is about to be saved:



Anyone else encountered this issue?

So no one tried version 2.29 yet?
I really need to know if the problem is at my end!

After the installation of the Visual C++ 2010 package it works fine for me:

Thank you very much for testing!
Could you, please, try to scan the system's drive and see if it is able to save the catalog? That's when I get the error (it's a relative large drive - 125000 files in 25000 folders)...

And, by the way, you don't have to install Visual C++ 2010 package; you can extract "mfc100.dll" and "msvcr100.dll" files using 7-zip and moving them in Cathy's folder.

No problems with the system drive, joby...





If size matters, I tried with a folder with 104.000 files and 18.000 sub-folders and again without problems.

joby_toss wrote: And, by the way, you don't have to install Visual C++ 2010 package; you can extract "mfc100.dll" and "msvcr100.dll" files using 7-zip and moving them in Cathy's folder.

I forget certain lessons...

joby_toss wrote:So no one tried version 2.29 yet?
I really need to know if the problem is at my end!

I tested 2.29 with the binaries extracted from the MVC++ R-D pkg the author lists on his site:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=5555

and the binaries from the MVC++ R-D SP1 pkg you linked:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=8328

Results: No errors

Aside from quite a large amount of sub-folders, the only difference I see; it looks like your launching Cathy (with path variables) from FreeCommander

Try launching directly from a command prompt and see if there is any change: HTH,
~Ruby

Food for thought:

Since Cathy has always worked for me over the years (and for backwards compatibilty); I decided to remove the MVCP runtime binaries and restore the previous (2.28.3) version.

The two drives that I had scanned while testing did not show in the Catalogs list, upon checking Cathy's folder, the indexed file/drives were present.

I deleted the .caf indexed file/drives and restored the .caf.bak (removed the .bak ext) and they are now showing up in the Catalogs list again.

~Ruby

Thank you all! You've helped me a lot!
No matter what I try, I'm still getting that error.
My best guess is that there is a "problematic" file/folder that screws up the scanning process... But version 2.28.3 works fine...I don't know...
I'll try to contact the author and keep both versions for now.

Ruby wrote:Food for thought:

Since Cathy has always worked for me over the years (and for backwards compatibilty); I decided to remove the MVCP runtime binaries and restore the previous (2.28.3) version.

I really need the new version, without the 65535 folders limit, because my external HDD is surpassing it.

The two drives that I had scanned while testing did not show in the Catalogs list, upon checking Cathy's folder, the indexed file/drives were present.

I deleted the .caf indexed file/drives and restored the .caf.bak (removed the .bak ext) and they are now showing up in the Catalogs list again.

~Ruby

So, there are some problems with 2.29 version...