title: Installing Magento 1.6 on stubborn Windows host
body: <p>I have a stubborn (or maybe inexperienced would be a nicer word) Windows host on which I'm trying to install Magento. They have a Plesk interface which allows me to install either Magento 1.4.1 or 1.5.1. But as I've had image upload problems with 1.5 that have been fixed in 1.6, I want to use 1.6 obviously.</p>
  
  <p>The host's support were helpful but unwilling to install 1.6 for me, their web applications are provided by a 3rd party so my guess is that they'd need to pay them for the 1.6 installer. I don't understand... Also they have no way of letting me connect via SSH.</p>
  
  <p>Anyway I've installed a fresh Magento 1.5 on the host, installed Magento 1.6 on my home PC, tried exporting the 1.6 database and importing it into the 1.5 database but it failed to import. I copied the 1.6 files over to the host and navigating to the URL gives me a "The service is unavailable." message.</p>
  
  <p>What a pain. There are lots of threads on the Magento website regarding upgrading a 1.5 installation to 1.6 but mostly involving Pear or Mage or SSH or... Surely there must be an easier way!?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Does anyone have an ideas of an easy way to install Magento 1.6 on there?</strong></p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I tried @clockworkgeek suggestion of using the 'downloader'.</p>
  
  <p>From a clean install of 1.5, I went to /downloader and logged in, typed the extension key "http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community/Mage_All_Latest" and clicked Proceed.</p>
  
  <p>It started installing and looks great. But then this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CONNECT ERROR: Package community/Lib_Varien 1.6.1.0 depends on PHP extensions: Array
  
  Fatal error: Call to undefined method Varien_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Mysql::isTableExists()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Gah, stinky. Then when I navigated to /downloader again, I get this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>dbModel read resource does not implement Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It's totally broken now. Sob :(</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>