Update Origin when it claims a missing DLL

Because Electronic Arts hires a complete morons as developers of their Origin software, you will often find yourself in a situation where:

  • Automatic update of Origin for PC fails asking you to download offline installer
  • Running offline installer fails with missing DLLs error

Leaving you with virtually no options for updating Origin client.

“Virtually”, because by a complete accident I found a solution for EA stupidity.

The cause

Any attempt to run OriginSetup.exe (offline installer and updater) ends with one or more of these errors:

The most irritating thing is that all these files are correctly placed in c:\Windows\System32 folder. Simply because Origin client won’t run up (and you wouldn’t be able to play any game) without these libraries.

So, this is not a problem of your PC or Windows, but rather some dumbass idiot messed up something in the source code of OriginSetup.exe file.

The solution

By a complete accident I figured out that OriginSetup.exe file is a regular, typical .zip archive that can be unzipped by many ZIP software or clients. I use Total Commander’s client for that.

So…

  1. Download offline installer in newest version and save it as OriginSetup.exe somewhere
  2. Run Total Commander and navigate to location of OriginSetup.exe file in left pane
  3. Select some destination (temporary!) folder in the right pane
  4. Select OriginSetup.exe file and Hit Alt+F9 to unpack selected file
  5. Check Unpack each archive to a separate subdir option and hit Enter to confirm
  6. When unpacking is done, run OriginThinSetupInternal.exe file from the unpacked OriginSetup folder

Summary as a picture:

And… you’re done. There should be no more fake-alerting about missing libraries and your Origin client should be easily updated to the newest version after about five minutes.

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