I got it to work across the network, I was trying to save the shared file from the laptop onto the desktop and then add (open) it from the desktop and it wanted to overwrite. I created it on the desktop and was allowed to add it from the laptop without it trying to overwrite. Maybe I did something wrong before or maybe the shared file has to be created on the host machine.

Still waiting to see if Csoftlab will comment on the rest of my previous questions.

I hate to bother the tech support when the program was free.

The program looks useful, but there are some areas that could be improved and/or more understandable.

Is there any way to import the priority or to import the recurrence.
I can't see any way to get this info in the program other than to manually edit each item.

Is there any way to import the category? Also the categories have colors assigned, is there any way to get the colors to show up in the calendar view?

I am not sure how to get a shared database to be visible for activation across a network.

Is there anyway to get the month view to be the page that opens up when starting the program.

It would be helpful if csoftlab would have a user forum to help answer questions like this.

The organizer stopped working after... just two days. There is no chance to reinstall it and activate :-/ It says that licence is not valid. Tried to use both installers - provided by giveawayoftheday and one taken from publisher website.

I installed the program as instructed and it is activated. My OS is Windows XP Pro SP3. Nobody said the example contact Thompson Joan is a very cute girl!!! Thanks a lot GAOTD!!!

Installed fine on Win 7 Pro x64, but there were two checkboxes you had to uncheck to keep the program from running automatically after installation. Ran activation without running program, showed not activated. Rebooted. Still not activated. Used Task Manager to kill app, ran activation again. Still not activated. Rebooted again. Ran activation. This time, it activated, but had a very weird crash after the computer went to sleep with the program running, and on forced reboot, the HD ran like mad which freaked me out. Booted into safe mode, ran diagnostics and AV, all OK, rebooted, and so far OK.

As a PIM, it will do what I need it to do, so it's probably a keeper assuming the weird crash was unrelated. I like the interface, and I especially like the fact that I can put hyperlinks in notes...this will help me keep track of where my source files for research are without cluttering up the organizer.

Ran setup as instructed but before setup finished I unchecked the "run" box. Activated. Opened the program and it was unregistered. Closed the program as the developer suggested using the File>Close menu and then re-opened but still unregistered. Closed and opened again, this time the program was registered. Should be useful like Outlook but not as many bells and whistles. Good program. Thanks.

I was having problems activating. It WILL activate if you exit the program from the task bar and THEN run the activate.exe file. Goofy that this is necessary.

I don't know if I'm alone on this, but as one who runs as a standard user rather than an admin, a lot of GOTD software (not just here I'm sure, but ever since I found this site this has come up a lot) will activate only for the admin, meaning I would have to run the software as admin else it would start as unregistered/trial software. The advice someone gave was to use resource hacker on activate.exe and remove the trustinfo section (in the 24 (or whatever number)/1/1033 resource), recompile script, then save. This allows activate.exe to be run without elevation, thus activating the software for the local standard user account rather than the admin. Obviously, the activate.exe has to be run for each user.

Alternatively, after activating one could search for the registration info in the admin's registry (run regedit as administrator), export the key (usually the publisher's name), then import the key into the local registry by running regedit normally or just double-clicking on the exported .reg file.

Neither of these solutions is for the average user unfortunately. I don't know of an easier way though.

By the way, and please feel free to edit this line out as it is for the GOTD team. Please, *please* would someone get back to me about the forum? I can create a new account but I never receive an email with the password, neither at signup nor by using password recovery. I have tried using the contact form about this issue multiple times with no response to this day. Will someone *PLEASE* tell me what is going on here? Is registration closed, is my IP address banned for some odd reason? Or what? Thank you.

Hi I have as I thought was going to be an easy install. And guess what it was. Why is it that people do not follow the instructions of people who go to the trouble of making a comment on this forum. Now I am 62 am self-taught computer geek build and repair my computers and dapple in a bit of programming. But I had no lessons I read and watched and listened. If you do those 3 things you will pick up a lot of knowledge you didn’t know you had.
Ok I downloaded the program it was a zipped file for people who don’t understand this means the program is compressed. you need a program to uncompressed it. So once downloaded you click on the set up.exe wording it will install the program for you. At the end you will see it is a trial version not fully registered. If you look up in the zipped files there is one that says activate. Now I know a lot of people close programs with clicking the red "X" on the right top of the program, you should not close program this way as if you were to do this in a program like office you can corrupt the files. So as others have said click on the word file left top then you will see close click on that. This will have completely closed the program down. Ok now click on the activate icon in the zipped folder it will do a few things and may ask you is this a safe program depending on what antivirus program you have, accept it as you know it’s safe. Then if you open the program you will now see it’s not a trial version but in fact a full registered professional version. I know this is long winded but please keep it in mind as most software is in fact installed and registered like this.
Glad I am hopefully of some assistance, so pleaseif you think I have explained this to you give me lots of ticks in the box at the bottom of my comment
Regards,
Yendale

I can't get the idea thing to work, so I'll suggest here:
I would like to sync to Google calendar. Many people sync their PCs/pads/phones to a central Google calendar. Since the sync from Google to the other devices is already worked out, if you synced from C-Organizer to Google you would automatically add a lot of devices.

Thank you GAOTG...Download as Administrator.. closed program by using File and exit... Activated as Administrator...And is Activated with no glitch nor problem... I have Vista 64 bit.... thanks CSoftLab... It is a great program :)

If you still can't register after closing the program, do this:

Right-click on an empty space in the Task Bar
Select 'Start Task Manager'
Click 'Processes' tab
Click 'Image Name' column title to sort alphabetically
Find C-OrganizerPro.exe and right-click on it
Select 'End Process'

Hope that helps!

I ran the installation program as administrator in Win7 64bit and then the activation program also as administrator. It appeared to have activated fine but when I attempted to run the program I received an error message: "Could not find provider. Program may not have installed correctly". I have never run into this error message before and do not have a clue what it means. I'm going to attempt the install one more time and if it fails I'm going to let it go. The program looks interesting but I don't need to spend a lot of time trying to get it to run properly. Anyone else run into this error?

Thanks

By the way, for anyone having trouble activating (Vista/7 users, and restarting the program does not work): try what I said in this comment: http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/cubedrift-2/#comment-188607 (and the one right beneath that one).

I agree with the comment about Evernote. I think I found it more preferable since I have seen its best results. But imma go try to have a check on this software though.

Dear CSoftLab,

Please advise if I had missed out some steps or this is a software bug:

I keyed in my child's weekly tuition schedule into the calendar.
It's every Thursday at 3.30pm to 5.30pm.
No problem keying in this at all.
So I clicked OK after I keyed in everything.

After 5 minutes, I realized that I had keyed in 5.03pm instead of 5.30pm.
So I right-clicked the entry and select edit
When I chose open the series, the time fields were greyed out and I was unable to change the time at all.

Thank you in anticipation

Win XP SP 3 installed and registered ok on a USB stick.

Essential PIM free version is a competitor to this but cannot remember why Essential PIM would not install as a portable version for me, so I am glad C Organiser has. Not enough time to test everything yet
but I would recommend downloading it now while you can.

Thanks for the info, those who responded. All better now.

Re Registration confirmation : AFter the Activate and shutdown and restart, go to HELP to check and you'll see it sez Licensed to giveawayoftheday.

DON"T expect to see rego confirmation in REGISTRATION as that will still appear empty as if the program is not registerd.

Nuts? You bet.

Thanks GOTD & devs.

From the FAQ page, the program should be portable.

Q: Is it possible to carry C-Organizer or Advanced Diary with me in my "stick" drive from home computer to work computer, etc?

A: Yes, you can install C-Organizer or Advanced Diary directly to the memory stick, USB drive or any other removable device and then run the program directly from this device.

I installed the program on a USB stick. It activated fine and runs fine.

I do not have another computer. In order to see if the program is really portable, I restored my computer to an earlier image. Now the program on the USB stick has reverted to 30 days' trial.

Maybe the paid version do not have this problem, but this giveaway version will easily lose the activation. Perhaps the developer should rethink the method of having this giveaway version activated.

To those of you who despite following all of the previous tips, still continue having problems with the activation I suggest that, after exiting the program, you go back to the folder with the extracted files and activate the program once again.

It worked for me, and it might work for you too.

Hope it helps,

Consuella

For those that want to try running this as a portable, be aware that the registration does NOT seem to be portable.

So while c-organizer will run off of a USB stick on the original computer in perpetuity once registered . . . on the guest computer c-organizer appears to start the 30 day evaluation (and may not be usable at all on a guest computer 31 days from now).

running windows 7 pro x64... after reading all the comments I ran the set up .exe as admin and unchecked option to 'launch when finished'; next ran activate .exe as administrator. I then rebooted my laptop. When I ran the program it did start up as trial version. So I closed program as instructed.I then ran task manager to verify program was closed and saw it was still running under the process tab (it did not show up under application tab). I stopped the program there and then went back and ran the activate.exe .
Started the program and was a little skeptical when I check the registration under the help menus and it was still asking for a licensing code. I felt much better when I looked under the 'about' tab and saw it registered to GAOTD.
It took a little more time to setup this program than usual (reading all the comments and taking each step a little slower) but everything seems to be going fine.
I like this organizer and seems pretty easy to setup with all my personal info. So far I have not run into any other problems or error messages. Thanks GAOTD.

Very few PIM makers think to have a 'Birthday' recurrence. If someone were born on this day in 1989 the app would be telling me I was having my 22nd birthday. So simple.
It does seem very similar to Outlook's PIM features and to Smart Diary Suite's. Same old same old?

> Activation seems to be a major problem with this vendor.

> Just about the entire comments section is taken up right now with
> activation issues, so that should tell us something.

How do you like that!

From what I can tell (XP), you need to install & run the program (setup.exe) once, first, then completely exit, including the system tray icon. (Up to that point, the title bar showed it to be a 30-day trial.) THEN run activate.exe which will register the program.

If you run activate.exe first, then setup.exe, the setup looks to wipe out the activation (registration).

No (system) reboots required.

Includes CHM help file.
Takes up ~18 MB disk space. (Database size obviously based on what you store in it.)
Does not seem to need to write to your system drive (which I find kind of atypical).

Program is resizable, as are most elements of its UI.
UI automatically adjust to account for changes in windows size. Wish more programs did that.

Looks comprehensive, well designed, clean layout.

Strange location for the "Customize" options :-)
(See if you can find them.)

If you're looking for this type of program, I'd say it's certainly worth investigating.

That's about as far as I'll go, cause I'm not "in" to these types of programs & I'm not sure what to look for or what to look out for in, & /not being familiar/, the options are a bit overwhelming to me & I'm not really interested in spending the time.

#63 This error message means that you cannot connect to GOTD activation server. Try to configure your firewall and allow this connection.

#65 Please try to run activation as a current user (not as administrator). This should help.

Ran setup as Admin on Vista, unchecked the box to run C-O on finish. Ran Activate as Admin. Started C-O, but unfortunately *not* registered.

Evernote does almost everything this software does... and it is more popular and it is on smartphones.. you tell me what I get from you, more than evernote?

anyway, thanks for your hardwork and giving out free...

I installed C-Organizer Pro (as administrator) as instructed and exited the program. But repeated attempts to activate (as administrator) failed. Each attempt led to the same message: "Failed to connect. Please try again later." Any suggestions?

Hi Folks,

For many the Professional, what we get here, is the way to go:

e.g Note these in Professional, not Lite

Category Support
Calendar of Events
Network Support

And more. The Lite would not be ready for prime-time, the Pro might be really good. Time & Chaos was one I used to use.

This looks like a quality alternative, that has been playing in this PIM field a long time. There are lots of quirks that make one PIM friendlier to you than another. Especially in issues like integration of events, addresses, todo.

Let's see if we can get more actual program discussion in the hours ahead.

Thanks,
Steven

#59 Yes, I think you are right. An option to close C-Organizer (or minimize it to tray) when you click the X button exists in the General Options, but by default it minimizes program to tray. We should change this option to exit by default.

Apologies: I stand corrected -- it does let you specify whether or not the close button minimizes the program. Maybe the default could be set during installation rather than already being set?

I wonder why developers take something fundamental in the Windows interface (the close button at the top right of the program's window) and turn it into something else, like a minimize-to-tray button which hides the window instead. If anything, this should be optional. When I tell a program to close, I expect it to close, and most of the 50+ messages here seem to bear out that others think so too. ;)

Just about the entire comments section is taken up right now with activation issues, so that should tell us something. Big companies sometimes do lots of research with the public before deciding on major user interface elements, to make sure people actually do get the use out of the software that's intended. I hope that all this feedback encourages the necessary change(s) so we can move on to how well the software actually does its intended job. :)

Thanks, CSoftLab, for participating here!

C-Organizer Pro is a nice PIM that's almost portable [it writes to the registry, if that matters to you], is closer to a full-fledged database than much of the competition, but lacks the connectivity of many alternatives in this crowded field... some people need or prefer a PIM that works, integrates with on-line resources like Facebook, Google Docs etc. Importing Contacts & other data is limited to *.csv &/or *.txt, but realistically if you have & use something like Outlook, I'm not sure why you'd want to import your stuff into C-Organizer Pro to begin with. One advantage is that you can create shared or private databases, accessing the same content across a biz or home network, though you can only open one instance of C-Organizer Pro, with one open database at a time -- I'd think it would be more useful if you were able to view & work with private & shared databases at the same time, e.g. company or family events + your personal lunch dates. Overall C-Organizer Pro strikes me as very competent PIM, though among all the things it can do I didn't see any one killer feature to get really excited about.

Installation isn't bad at all, though I was surprised by the amount of info stored in the C-OrganizerPro registry key by default -- I recorded well over 4k new entries, even though setup.exe primarily adds just 2 keys, one for uninstall & one for today's GOTD. Once C-Organizer Pro was installed & activated I went to the Tools menu -> Options -> Additional category, selecting "Save settings in INI file" -- then I closed the program & deleted that HKCU\ Software \C-OrganizerPro key in Regedit... C-Organizer Pro started & ran fine, though a new C-OrganizerPro key [with just 3 values] was created. [I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do that -- only that it worked. :-) ] Using SysInternals Process Explorer I didn't see C-Organizer Pro using anything out of the ordinary, & the added "C-Organizer Pro" program folder holds 60 files, 6 folders, ~18 MB. The C-Organizer Pro web site gives a decent listing of features, though it's one of very few sites I've seen without any About page, & once you get beyond the maybe oddly worded intro, the included help file is pretty complete, telling you what you need to know in an easily understood format.

Activated OK after I read #15 from the GAOTD team. Initial impression is good.
Interface is similar to Microsoft Outlook but more initiative. I've used Outlook for years at work but don't like it so this may be a better choice for home use.
Contacts looks good. I clicked on the 'email contact' and it pulled up my default email software, Thunderbird.
Notes is a nice feature.
Tasks looks good with more features than Outlook.
Synchronizing with a smart phone may be a problem but I haven't tried it. I don't know if it will work or not but I do know that is an important feature for many people.
It will take a few days of use to determine if this a good application for me but my initial impression is good and I'm sure it will be a useful program for many people.

The software downloaded and installed fine.
It registered fine (after rebooting the computer).
I tried to setup email notification to my hotmail account
just like the help file shows and I can not get the test to pass.
The idea is to have notifications sent to my Cell phone. How great that would be if only it worked.

If you have any technical problems with C-Organizer, please contact CSoftLab support team.

#50: Some drivers are necessary for C-Organizer to work with the database files. These drivers comes with Windows installation package. This error message means that C-Organizer cannot find Microsoft Data Access Components 2.1. Probably this driver is damaged on your computer.

#51: This green button should open a website, stored in the Passwords entry. Just do not save dangerous websites in the passwords.

#49, 52 and all, who have similar problems, please contact our support team by email.

Best regards,

CSoftLab Support team

EssentialPIM free version does essentially what this does (a few obscure features left out). It's free, portable, easy on system resources, and can get updates. It imports easily without issues others have noted in this program. Upon checking out C-Organizer, I see no compelling reason to switch. A few reviewers have noted this, and its similarity in look. Now, if EssentialPIM Pro ever gets offered on GAOTD, that might be worth upgrading from the EssentialPIM free version. Mostly though,I use Gmail with contacts, calendars, tasks, etc. for these functions.

I have taken the advice of GAOTD Team and still get evaluation copy notice.
I have since uninstalled same and will watch for an update to this problem

Installed fine for me, Ran the install and the activation as admin. However as I was exploring the program (Passwords) I hit the green arrow buttons to the far right, It attempted to open a site, McAfee's Site adviser stopped it from going into the site and flagged it red, said it was a dangerous site. Can anyone give me any insite on this.

Don't know if anyone came across the same problem as mine but when i tried to run the program it displays an error saying "Error creating object. Please verify that the Microsoft Data Access Components 2.1 or later have been properly installed"....any suggestion would be appreciated
running window 7 64-bit home basic

How do I register COrganizer Pro? I cannot find instructions on how to do so. Thank you.

Daly

For those who don't see why we're not given a registration code with every program or a preregistered build, here's my take:

It's not necessarily GOTD that want to put registration info in an registry-type activation module, but the developers. By not exposing the registration info as plaintext (i.e. in readme.txt), developers can buy some time before someone cracks the wrapper and pulls out the registry file. Now, I'm not sure how effective that is, but to the average user it prevents them from using the code after the giveaway is over, especially with programs that don't do online activation. Of course, using this method comes with its own risks, namely if someone does pull out the registry file, they'll know where registration info is stored in the registry. But of course, they're probably more interested in the codes themselves.

Tried everything, as suggested, to install this including turning off firewall etc. When I try to start the program I get a message which says 'Abnormal program termination. Usually have no installation problems with GOTD. Have to pass on this. Keep up the good work GOTD.

Jake - if you right click on the activate it will come up with a menu. One of the options is 'run as administrator'. Run the activate as admin (with the c-organizer program closed) and it will activate it no trouble. Hope this helps

What's the difference between this and EssentialPIM, which is free? They look so much alike..

Installed, activated and registered no problem. As suggested elsewhere, a reboot is required before the registration shows as such, so it should be included in the instructions.

Unfortunately, importing is a disaster. The default fields that show up in contacts, for example are a wide field for "Title", followed by a wide field for "Category". Name, which is kind of handy in a contacts list, is nowhere to be found. Also, the fields seemed to import to the wrong fields, even though I had to manually go through and match up the imported fields with the database fields. Just a mess!

If it can't do that simple operation, it has little use to me. Uninstalled.

#5 Has it exactly right. This is becoming an all-too-frequent problem on GAOTD.

Apparently we - the "great unwashed" - are not savvy enough to note the difference between a trial and a real free offering.

Why would I commit my information and my energy to something that is not mine long-term?

A nice multipurpose organizer for me. A very distinct and freshly clean interface. This is one of the better if not top organizers offered on GAOTD in my opinion. A keeper. By the way for you that are having problems with activation; just follow the directives for installation. It is pretty plain and written in stone. You do not need a registration or license code. When you activate, you are activated successfully automatically and licensed to GAOTD. Remember, this is a "FREE GIVEAWAY" as promoted by the vendor via GAOTD. No need to look for anything else. You are ready to "GO"...........!!!