The below is an amazing trick for working around the need for an updated Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable runtime on a Windows machine where you do not have admin rights. It’s not ideal (you have to copy the dlls to every app folder) but it will let you run apps that need a more recent runtime than the system admin of your computer has installed.

This process was tested with Saber which I use for note taking at my $dayJob.

Please note: I ran the Python steps below on my home computer and shared the extracted dlls to my $dayJob computer. I did this as I already have Python setup at home and I didn’t want to add extra ‘stuff’ to my $dayJob computer. This process should work on any computer without admin rights.

The procedure:

  • Install python3 with pip
    • For only current user, not all users – current user only does not need admin rights
  • Launch Powershell
  • Set-Alias -Name python3 -Value C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\python.exe
    • Be sure to change UserName to your actual user name for the system
  • python3 -m pip install requests
  • mkdir ~/Downloads/vc_dist
  • mkdir ~/Downloads/vc_dist/Downloads
  • cd ~/Downloads/vc_dist
  • Invoke-WebRequest https://gist.githubusercontent.com/donno/34aeb93dbaefa13a0d6a41953a17c024/raw/8dab5960d44aa7f951844496987d559afb5fc3c2/fetch_vcdist.py -OutFile .\fetch_vcdist.py
  • python3 .\fetch_vcdist.py --destination .
  • If the version you need wasn’t downloaded, add it to the list at the top of the fetch_vcdist.py file & re-run prior step
  • Rename any files ending with .dll_amd64 to .dll
  • Copy files to the app’s exe folder that needs a specific vc runtime thats not installed on the machine
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