[ The PC Guide | The PC Guide Disk Edition | General Information ]

How the Disk Edition Works

Since I put The PC Guide up on the web at the end of September 1997, the response to it has been overwhelmingly positive. Many people have contacted me to tell me that they find The PC Guide a very valuable resource. The combination of the site being both useful and very large (over 2,700 individual content pages, not including indexes and framesets) has led numerous people to ask if there were any way the entire site could be made available for use off-line from the Internet. This is what the Disk Edition is.

When I wrote The PC Guide, I intentionally created it with portability in mind (though I had not planned at the time to be selling it on CD-ROM!) All of the several thousand hyperlinks between pages on the site are relative, so most of the pages will work regardless of where they reside. Furthermore, with the exception of the search engine, there are no fancy elements on the site such as CGI scripts or other structures that require a web server to be running in order to allow the pages to work. The combination of these features enables The PC Guide to be installable just about anywhere that long filenames are supported, on-line or off-line, and be fully operational (again, with the exception of the search engine).

You have your choice of either downloading the Disk Edition from the Internet, or getting it on CD-ROM. When you get your copy, you install it on your hard disk and use your browser to view the pages. You can also use the included PDF file version of the site to search for material or print out topics. It works almost exactly the same way as it does over the World Wide Web--only faster and simpler. The CD-ROM version can also be browsed directly from the CD, no installation required. In fact, the CD will automatically launch your browser and load The PC Guide Disk Edition’s front page for you.

Note: The contents of The PC Guide Discussion Forums are not included in the Disk Edition, for both technical and privacy reasons.

Next: Benefits of the Disk Edition

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