Hi, this is Greg Shields and I am going to show you an easy way that you can instantly convert one of those nasty EXE based installations into a much more easy-to-use MSI installation.

You will see here that I have downloaded the Adobe Reader version 10 in English.' As I downloaded it, it came down as an .EXE file.' If you have read the article associated with this video you will know that .EXE files have, in many cases, a very different structure for the switches you would use to run that installation in silent mode.'' You will see here that I have run the .EXE with a /? switch so I could bring up the different setup options that are available.

Now, let us see here, we have a /sAll and a /sPB for Silent mode with progress bar. These are indeed silent switches it looks like in my sleuthing.' But, they are switches I have never seen before. They are new to me and so I will probably have to go through some troubleshooting to figure out what these switches mean and if I am going to actually get the result I am looking for.

A much better solution may be to actually convert this .EXE into an .MSI file. Again, if you read the article, you know that .MSI files have that similar switch structure for how to invoke the executable and install the application in silent mode. Let me go ahead and close this down.

Now see here, if I go and just double-click this executable here one of the first things that happens is that it needs to go and unpack its installation files.'' Adobe Reader has a customized version of this screen, but a lot of the different EXE's that you may see have this kind of delay that is required after you double-click the EXE but before you get, well, the first screen that shows up to start the installation.

Before I go through and begin the installation manually or change any of the parameters, another option I can use is to actually go to my temp file location. If I go here to %Temp% for many applications, I will actually find the MSI associated with this .EXE inside of my temp folder.

In this case, with Adobe, it is not found inside of this Temp Folder, but instead, there is a log file that I can find in this folder that will give me a little more information about where I might need to look.' Let me double-click that log file. You will notice that if I scroll down here and take a look at the different parameters I can see here this thing called Installer folder and according to this, the Installer folder is C:\Programdata\Adobe\setup and this long GUID here.

I am going to copy this to the Clipboard and then open up Run and paste it in. So that I can go to this Programdata\Adobe\Setup folder and, what do you know, there is AcroRead.MSI.' This is the MSI that I could potentially use if I have it in the right location, for deploying Acrobat Reader out using the MSI method as opposed to the EXE based method.