Install CutePDF Silently on Windows 7 64bit and remove the ASK Toolbar

Install CutePDF Silently on Windows 7 64bit and remove the ASK Toolbar

Well, there I was trying to figure out how to create a silent install script for CutePDF on our Windows 7 64bit PCs. After losing a few hairs trying to work out why it wasn’t working silently it was because setup was looking for a 32bit installation of ghostscript. Answer?

Install a 32bit version of ghostscript alongside your 64bit version. Here is my silent install script below. Notice how we uninstall the ASK Toolbar using the msi reference point in the registry. This works quite well for us and we run the install script at logon to prevent killing any open instances of Internet Explorer (this pops up after the install displaying the readme file). I have seen a few posts that say if you use the /no3d switch when installing cutewriter the Ask Toolbar wont be installed – this may be true for earlier version but it doesn’t work on the latest version.

Downloads

Cutepdf available from: http://www.cutepdf.com/download/CuteWriter.exe
Cute 32bit Converter: http://www.cutepdf.com/download/converter.exe
Ghostscript 64bit: http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/gs906w64.exe

I like to remove the Start Menu items to tidy things up a bit on the Users Start Menu.

That’s it, simple but effective. We use Landesk Managment Suite to roll out the script silently to users but it would be equally effective in a login script, perhaps also adding some error control to check to see if it is already installed before you begin)

Hope it helps, shout if you want any more info. 🙂

Install CutePDF Silently on Windows 7 64bit and remove the ASK Toolbar

Install CutePDF Silently on Windows 7 64bit and remove the ASK Toolbar

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12 thoughts on “Install CutePDF Silently on Windows 7 64bit and remove the ASK Toolbar”

  1. Hi Ben,

    Thank you very much 🙂 Great work !
    It’s great script !

    It’s save me a lot of time because we plan change Win 7 32bit to 64bit and my old CutePDF installation doesn’t work.

    Thanks, Internet it’s amazing because you can get help from peoples over the World.

    Greatings from Poland not so small country in Europe 😉

  2. Thanks for the tips, very helpful.

    Turned this into a task sequence in SCCM, worked great.

    Just a couple notes for anybody going through this later:

    I left out the converter as it did not run silently, but doesn’t appear to be necessary for the print to PDF functionality anyway.

    Also the latest download of v3.0 from the CutePDF site run with the /VERYSILENT
    switch does NOT actually install the ASK toolbar or anything else, so the taskkill and uninstall lines can also be excluded.

  3. Worked great thanks

    Dave: maybe you didn’t extract converter.exe to a subfolder ’32bitconverter’

    I used the following with SCCM 2012 R2

    gs906w64.exe /S
    32bitconverter\setup.exe /s
    CuteWriter.exe /VERYSILENT /no3d
    rd “%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\CutePDF” /S/Q
    rd “%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\Ghostscript” /S/Q

  4. Where do I get the 32 bit Converter so I can run setup.exe /s I downloaded the GS 32 bit and changed the script to refer to that exe. This might be wrong, so how do I get this to work?

    1. The other thing is the two remove directory lines are saying the path is invalid I don’t know if the new version of Writer doesn’t create those directories in %ALLUSERSPROFILE% I am going to try to exclude those lines and see if I get the program to install.

  5. Just wanted to add a couple of things.
    If you take “converter.exe” and rename it to “converter.zip”, you can extract it to the folder where you have your setup files. The output will be a folder named GPLGS and a file named “Setup.exe”. You can then write your script as below:

    TASKKILL /IM iexplore.exe /F
    “\\SERVERSHARE\Software\CutePDF\gs9533w64.exe” /S
    “\\SERVERSHARE\Software\CutePDF\setup.exe” /s
    “\\SERVERSHARE\Software\CutePDF\CuteWriter.exe” /VERYSILENT /no3d /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES /NORESTART
    rmdir /s /q “%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\CutePDF”
    rmdir /s /q “%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Ghostscript”

    This will install all the required components for CUTEPDF Writer and remove the GhostScript and CUTEPDF Writer items from the start menu.

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