When I downloaded Scrivener for windows I didn’t know how to unzip in the modern world, and I somehow really messed up.
I downloaded the old trial with no trouble. And went through the tutorial. Uninstalled that to download the NaNo 11 version.
Didn’t call a tech because it was the weekend. Can I uninstall the mess I made? or should I call the tech? (He’s expensive!) And, can I download it then again?
You should be able to clean it all up, but I’m not quite clear on what did happen to know how best to walk you through this. First off, the Windows NaNoWriMo Trial downloads as a .exe file, not a .zip, so it sounds like you may have downloaded the “extras” from further down the webpage: this is just the NaNoWriMo project template and compile settings, made available for those who aren’t using the trial but want to import these into the regular version. If you download the trial .exe, this is all included, so you won’t need that .zip file at all.
If all you did was double-click the .zip file, Windows wouldn’t have extracted anything, just allowed you to view it; maybe that was the problem? Nothing in this .zip is an installer, though, so it wouldn’t have done anything to your computer in any case. To access the files, you’d just need to right-click the .zip and choose “Extract All”, then let Windows do its thing. You’ll get a new, unzipped folder with the contents. So that’s generally how you’d deal with a .zip file, but again, if you just want to install the NaNo trial, you don’t really need this at all.
Instead, go to the NaNoWriMo Trial Offer page and scroll about halfway down. You’ll see two big Scrivener icons under the “Getting Started” section, one with the Mac logo and one with the Windows. These are the buttons to click for downloading the trial program. Click the Windows one, obviously, and then once the .exe is downloaded, go to your Downloads folder and double-click the ScrivenerNaNo11.exe to run the installer.
Thanks ever so much. jeannie
If you accidentally downloaded the linux one (ends in tgz), then it wouldn’t have done anything under windows. So nothing got installed, but I don’t think the windows OS would even recognize a tarball. So you’re probably fine.