Celestia Forums

I transferred by .cel files from my XP computer over to my new Win 7. When I tried to open the .cel files I received the error message saying Windows needed to know what created the file. I tried to convince it to use Celestia.exe to open them, but evidently that wasn't what the system wanted to hear. Any ideas....

There are several registry keys which need to be set. The easiest way to do that is to run Celestia's installer. Then move your Addons into the new extras folder.

If you install Celestia from a privileged account, then by default the installer will put Celestia into "Program Files (x86)". This will cause problems later because Windows is very protective of the "Program Files" directory trees. When the installer displays the destination folder name, change it to something else.

FWIW, I use C:\MyPrograms\Celestia -- note the lack of spaces in the folder name. There are many other programs which benefit from not being in "Program Files" -- usually ones which were designed to run under Unix or Linux, like StarGen, Planet and MMPS.

If you normally use a non-privileged account (as you should be) and install Celestia from there, by default the installer for Celestia v1.6.1 will put it into
C:\Users\<your-userid>\AppData\Celestia\

This has the additional benefit that Windows Backup will be able to do incremental backups of the directory tree, including all of your Addons.

Selden, once again you've come through for me. Thank you

You're very welcome!