[ The PC Guide | The PC Guide Disk Edition | Download, CD-ROM and Licensing Options ]

Internet Download Version

One convenient way to obtain the Disk Edition is to download it from the Internet. This is the best option for those who want to run the Disk Edition from a hard disk (as opposed to a CD-ROM). It is the most convenient option for my overseas readers. It also costs less than the CD-ROM version, and upgrades that are downloaded are now free of charge to those who have already purchased the Disk Edition.

The Disk Edition downloads as a self-extracting archive, which will install the HTML, graphics and support files to a directory on the hard disk and automatically start up The PC Guide when finished. This archive file is accessed from a password-protected page on the web site. Access to this special area on the site is granted through time-limited login/password combinations sent to you by email after your order is processed. In addition to the main Disk Edition archive, there are other archives containing the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the site, and the other Disk Edition extras. In the future, as the graphical content of the site grows, I will also offer the option of downloading only the text portion of the Disk Edition for those with slower or less reliable download connections (graphics take up a lot of bytes!)

The current sizes of the downloadable components of the Disk Edition are as follows:

• The main PC Guide Disk Edition files: about 16 MB.
• The Adobe Acrobat (PDF file) version of the Disk Edition: about 12 MB.
• The PC Webopaedia Lite download software: about 2 MiB.

Note: There was a problem with the original release of the Disk Edition, version 1.2, which caused ScanDisk to fail when scanning the hard drive folder where the Disk Edition was installed. This was due to a bug in ScanDisk, which could not handle deeply-nested folders. I have now changed the structure of the site (and Disk Edition) to eliminate this problem.

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