Sometimes when installing software on my Windows 7 Home Premium machine, I am prompted by the "Program Compatibility Assistant" with the following dialog:
How am I to decide if a program has installed correctly or not?
What it actually asks you is if installer has encountered any problems that caused it to abort. For example:
In those cases you should click Reinstall using recommended settings. The second button, This program installed correctly is for cases when the installer has finished without any errors (older installers don't report it to the system correctly).
Answer to this dialog affects only the installation process, not further functionality of the program.
The third button, Cancel, is useful in one particular case. Sometimes when you decide to cancel installer manually, this question is appear. You should just cancel (or close) it, because technically speaking the installer hasn't closed correctly, but not due to some problem.
Could there be more subtle problems even if the program runs? Perhaps certain features might not work?
- Of course, but you wouldn't know that unless you knew how every feature and function works. If you're the developer or the person who built the installer then you could audit the computer after the install to make sure it did in fact install correctly, but short of that there's no guaranteed way of knowing.