Windows install error 0x80070002 unable to install App

Yesterday I tried to install a Windows App via its built in App Store. Usually this works like a charm. This time the download seemed to succees (judged by the progress bar) but the installation failed with error 0x80070002;

Googling (and Bing’ing) found various issues with kind of the same description, ranging from “download failed” to “broken registry” (including repair guides). Yet none of the proposed solutions worked for me.

Hoping it would just be a temporary failure on the store side, I hit “retry” again and again while I was searching for other solutions (interrupted by a reboot – well you never know, sometimes it just helps). And suddenly a message appeared saying that a Microsoft account was required to install the app. That was strange as I had just switched to a MS account this day – and this message appeared just once! When I wanted to reproduce it it just failed with 0x80070002 again.

So I disconnected my account from MS again, reconnected afterwards and suddenly: The installation succeeded!

To make a long story short

If you experience an error 0x80070002 when installing an App from the store in Windows 8.1: Try to disconnect and reconnect your account from and to a Microsoft account:

  • Win-C (open charms bar)
  • Go down to settings
  • Go down to PC settings
  • Go to Accounts >> your account
  • Disconnect your account
  • Repeat the above to reconnect to your MS account
  • Try to install the App

Epson XP-205 Scanner in Windows 8.1 – How to get it back to work

Now it’s time for a Epson XP-205 Scanner to work with Windows 8.1

It took me a while now to get the XP-205 scanner component to run on my new Windows 8.1 via WiFi:

The problem is, that when you install the scan software, you might get a communication error telling you that the scanner is probably not connected or turned off. Both of course is not the problem.

So how you get it online in Windows 8.1:

  1. First install the Epson Scan software that you can obtain directly from epson (german version link).
  2. Open the scan software and verify that you (still) get the error.
  3. epson-scan-settings-1Then change to the Windows-Tile screen (just hit the Windows-Key on your keyboard) and type “Epson Scan”. A list should appear that shows the Epson Scan entries. One of them should be “Epson Scan Settings” (german: Epson Scan-Einstellungen).
  4. Now comes the tricky part:If you work as an administrator (which you shouldn’t do usually), just open the Epson Scan Settings tool. Otherwise right-click the Epson Scan Settings tool and start it with administrator privileges. This is very important! Otherwise you won’t be able to do the next step as an important part is greyed and thus unavailable!
  5. You should see the settings window with “Connection local” selected.
  6. epson-scan-settings-2Hit the “Network” button and then hit the “add” button below the Networkscanner address field.
    If this button is disabled, you probably do not run the program with admin privileges.
  7. Add the Scanner’s IP and give it a name.
  8. Hit the Test button – it should work now!

epson-scan-settings-4The scan software should work now. I first had some issues that I also had to run it with admin privileges. Sometimes I could start the scanning software, showing the correct user interfacec but it only scanned a very tiny part of the physical scan area (VERY strange).

So if you still experience some issues: Try restarting the computer first! If this doesn’t work, try starting as administrator.

Update: The Scan software surprised me today with a message similar to  “ah no – I won’t scan today”. So I

  • uninstalled the scan software. Well I tried, the files were still in the windows directory.
  • let the Software updater update the firmware of the device
  • reinstalled Epson Scan

And – suddenly everything is just fine.

OpenOffice vs LibreOffice on Windows 8.1

Just recently I wanted to install Libre- or OpenOffice on my Windows 8.1 machine. Google wasn’t much of a help: there are a lot of pages comparing OpenOffice with LibreOffice. Yet most of them conclude with a “it doesn’t matter which one you choose.”

But there is a quite relevant issue that is not covered in all the pages:
If you’re not working with administrator priviledges (which is recommended), LibreOffice is the way to go! OpenOffice installs the menu entries etc into the administrator account. This isn’t a major issue – You could easily add the menu entries manually.

Well or just use LibreOffice, which installs correctly – no manual intervention required!

IntelliJ IDEA and Scala being awfully slow on Windows 8.1

At work we are working mostly in Scala and most of us are using IntelliJ IDEA for coding. The choice of the operating system is up to the developer. As I am quite convenient with Windows (and use MS Office quite often), I am a happy Windows 8.1 user (btw: who the hell needs a start button when you have the windows key!? Anyways … different story).

The Problem

After a while when I started a Scalding project, IntelliJ became very slow and often turned to be non responsive for some seconds about once per minute. So over all it was a very inconvenient and unproductive situation.
Continue reading IntelliJ IDEA and Scala being awfully slow on Windows 8.1