If Paratext cannot check for updates

Question

Phil Leckrone and I had a mysterious problem, that John Wickberg diagnosed for us. Our Paratext could never check for updates. We’d go to Help > Check for Updates and Paratext would quickly say it could not connect to the update server. There was no problem with our Internet settings or firewall, we were able to send/receive and do other things in Paratext on the internet without problems.

What John found was that a Windows tool called Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) was frozen, by some jobs that had started but had been unable to finish. (None of these related to Paratext). What worked, was to run a command prompt command to empty our BITS queue.

The way to do this was to right click on a Command Prompt icon and choose “run as administrator”. Then we typed “bitsadmin /list”, and this showed the list of BITS jobs. Normally this should be empty. SInce it wasn’t for us, we could purge the queue by typing “bitsadmin /reset”. This emptied the BITS queue and our Paratext could check for updates again.

Answer 1

I recently installed the Paratext 7.6 beta. I immediately checked for updates and an update began downloading. After about an hour, however, only 4% had downloaded.

For released versions, there is a list of available updates at http://paratext.org/download/pt/updates/75 http://paratext.org/download/pt/updates/75, but this list doesn’t include beta versions.

So, I Googled the name of the update file ptwBeta7.6.51.63.SPUD and found an XML file at http://update.ubs-icap.org/Paratext/UpdateInfo.xml http://update.ubs-icap.org/Paratext/UpdateInfo.xml which lists the latest update to each branch and the download URL. I was then able to cancel the download from within Paratext (which was running slowly because of BITS), and start the download in my browser, which completed in about a minute. As an added bonus, I didn’t need to login to the Paratext website to download the update.

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