Installing via Download instead of Physical Media

[nit]

Many thanks! Glenn.

Blessings
Nit

[stoic01]

Hi Fr. Hogg,

Here is a link to the download instructions for the Mac operating system. The link comes from the BibleWorks FAQ pages.

https://kb.bibleworks.com/article/AA...tructions.html

As to your second question, I really can't answer that, as I was not involved in the price decision. I can say, however, that the owner, Mike Bushell, is a very generous man. Rather than just closing the company without advanced notice, he chose to give BibleWorks users a final opportunity to purchase the software at the lowest price every offered. The single price really simplifies the ordering process for everyone. His goal of keeping the program running in the future is his gracious offer, one that I have never heard from any other company. Even the old price for BW9 upgrades would have been $189, so no one is being cheated here. You will like BW10 better on your Mac than BW9. It just works better. But if you are going to order, you will have to do so before Friday June 15. After that it will be too late!

Blessings,
Glenn

Thanks for your help here, Glenn. I am very grateful for how BW has functioned for me, and for all the add-ons provided by users too. If nothing else, the cost issue will make me look at the parable of the vineyard with a little more sympathy. :-)

[MBushell]

1. The download instructions on this thread are for Windows machines. Are there instructions for Mac downloads? I sent an email last week, and now there's a huge backlog slowing responses. I'm a little reluctant to pay $199 if I'm not certain I can make it work.
2. I am grateful for all that the BW folks have done over the years, but I must note I find it a little perplexing that the same updating price applies no matter how long ago you last updated. Is there any explanation for the thinking behind this policy? (I feel a little like those who labored since the first hour in the parable).
Thanks in advance for any responses, especially to q1!

Fr. Gregory Hogg

Gregory,

If it were possible, I would give the program away but we cannot afford to do that. The price was set at a point where we would not lose money. It was set to be the same for everyone to simplify things for the remaining staff and for users. If we had chosen to set a different price depending on whether it was a new purchase or an upgrade, many people would pay more and no one would pay less. We can't go lower than this price. The price is remarkable given how much is in the package and the fact that it took 75 man years to get the program where it is, to say nothing of all the data. This is our gift to the church as a way of saying thanks for 25 wonderful years. The program will be, D. V., enriching Bible study for a long time to come.

Mike

[DavidR]

Amen and amen!

[John Fullerton]

The "hardest" part is mounting the iso (assuming you're on Windows 10). The instructions I found online was to use file explorer and select mount or to Open in the context menu. On one computer that worked but on the other it didn't have those options. I found out later that it may have been I also had a disc management program that can mount ISO files and apparently they took over Windows options.

I decided to use download for two reason, aside from waiting for DVDs. 1) Once I figured out the mounting issues it was faster to install but most important 2) I could copy the ISO to a couple external hard drives for backup. No more hunting around for the discs.

Just responding with my experience as a new customer downloading the ISO file probably on June 14, 2018. Some of these particulars could be due to the extra level of downloading activity as the last day of June 15th approached. I tried BW download manager from my university network and the download kept stopping without the option of restarting. I may have also tried downloading without the download manager, and that didn't work for the same reason. So, not knowing what to do, I tried downloading the ISO file for international customers, though I was in the United States. That file was on Google Drive and my experience was that the download worked from there.

Problems with handling the file. I verified the file size and copied it to an external drive. Then I took the external drive home and could not get the file to copy to my laptop. It kept stopping with an error--from memory I can't remember if it was at about 11% OR at around 4GB; both seem to be "remembered" though the 4GB was from mental calculation (and 11% would be nearer 2GB). I was using a Toshiba 1 terabyte drive. (I brought the external drive back to my workplace and tried to verify the copy by copying it back to my work PC that I had copied it from and could not get it to copy back--as I remember now. It was somewhat stressful for me I made two or three copies to the external drive and could not get the file to copy off of it.) I had also purchased a 32 GB flash drive for the project and was able to format it (I chose ExFAT format; it has to be formatted in a way that will allow the entire file to be copied; many flash drives have 4GB file limits unless specially formatted. SanDisk has this instruction online: "This is due to FAT32 limitation. Files larger than 4GB can NOT be stored on a FAT32 volume. Formatting the flash drive as exFAT or NTFS will resolve this issue.") and that copy would copy to my notebook PC. When copying from the flash drive to my notebook, the file transfer graphic indicator showed places where the speed slowed down, which reminded me of encountering the download errors (but might not have been that). The one time I was watching the status indicator as it slowed down, the transfer speed seemed to go down to about zero for a moment, so that concerned me about the file, however, everything else seemed to work correctly.

My Windows 10 notebook seemed to have a 3rd party program on it to handle the ISO file, mounting it to act as a new disk drive. I don't know if Windows 10 has a built-in option; the instructions seemed to indicate that Windows 10 could do it. When I tried it seemed that my 3rd party program did the task.

I would like to download the the final copy of the ISO file for the updated installation files for BW that is supposed to be online around July 1st and I have some concerns about how to archive that file. Some information that I've seen says that flash memory is rated for a year or two (though the copy *could* last several more years) and do-it-yourself archiving to DVDs is about the same (though there is an archival method of saving to DVDs, different than the simpler method that seems more usual).

Have a nice day
John