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Last week, I downloaded the 90-day trial version of Visual Studio 2013 and installed it on my desktop and laptop. It worked fine, and I started working on project using it.

Friday, a notice popped up in Visual Studio that Update #3 was available. I downloaded and installed it on my desktop and had no problem. But on my laptop, it would not install. It kept hanging up when installing "Core Tools". I tried repairing, uninstalling, reinstalling, everything I can think of and now VS 2013 won't even run on my laptop at all. I looked online and it appears I am missing some DLL files. They are not in the Trial ISO Image I got from Microsoft and when I look for them online, all I find are shady-looking sites that I wouldn't dare download a DLL from.

Is there a trusted place to get these missing DLLs? Or can I copy them from the desktop, which is running Win 8.1 to the laptop which is running Win 7? I didn't know if the DLL would be different on two different operating systems.

I would say make a Restore Point, and then try moving them over. If they have an identical name, they are likely the same DLLs, but at least you will have a fresh Restore Point to go back to if it causes problems.

Good point.

But that brings up another problem. Every time I install or update this, it says it's making a restore point, and there's a long enough pause in installation that it is doing *something*. So I figured I'd just restore back to before I installed Visual Studio 2013 last week and start again. There are no restore points to restore.

Does Windows create them hidden somehow?

Did you click the box to show them all?

Well, I went to System Restore and told it to restore... then a box popped up and said there were none to restore.

I didn't see a box to check, but I will look at that when I get home from work.

Oh wait a second...I forgot what we were talking about here. You don't want to use a restore point. You want to make a new one, in case something goes wrong with moving the DLLs over from the other system.

Make a new restore point, and then move over the DLLs. If something goes wrong, restore back to the point you made before you messed with them. Restore points cover changes to DLLs.

Gotcha