A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

Installing MikTeX on Windows 7

One of the only things that kept me from installing Windows 7 permanently during the school year was that the few times I tried, I had never gotten MikTeX^[1] to work. This of course was a major problem since nearly all of my assignments are done with MikTeX now. When installing MikTeX I always ran into a BSOD that I ignored because I figured that it was only because Windows 7 was only an RC^[2].

I've had Windows 7 on my desktop now for about 2 weeks and up until this point I've been making due with the MikTeX Portable Edition which is pretty buggy to say the least. More than half of the time it would hang on compiling a document to pdf at something due to it not thinking initexmf.exe was an operable program. And of course upon googling this problem, nothing of use could be found.

Well tonight I decided I'd give the install another go to see if either Windows 7 had been patched to fix this issue, or if MikTeX had fixed the problem. On my first try, it did exactly as it had always done before BSOD'd. Since I had never set windows to not automatically restart upon catastrophic system failure^[3] it would just instantly restart without giving me enough time to read the type of error. I fixed this and ran the installer once more. The BSOD was a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA error, which was pretty vague as usual but I figured it had to do with system paging, so I disabled the Virtual Memory restarted and ran the installer once more. This time it worked exactly as it should.

On another interesting note, I discovered that pdflatex is significantly faster than texify. I found this out when I was trying different methods of compiling my TeX documents into pdf's using the MikTeX Portable Edition which was giving me fits with my old method.

I used to use the following in NotePad++'s NppExec plugin to compile a pdf and view in Adobe Reader:

Now I use pdflatex:

1. MiKTeX (pronounced mick-tech) is an up-to-date implementation of TeX and related programs for Windows (all current variants). [↩]
2. Release Candidate [↩]
3. Read: Blue Screen Of Death [↩]