Thoughts on installing BibleWorks 8

BibleWorks 8 has been sitting on my desk all day just begging to be installed.  As I near the end of the day, I finally found a few minutes to complete the installation.   BibleWorks 8 is available in either a CD or DVD version.  I am performing my installation with the CD version.  The Quick-Start Guide indicates that the CD version has six discs.  My package only had 5, so I’m assuming this is a misprint.  The workstation I’m using for the installation is a Dell Inspiron 6000 (1.60 GHZ, 1260 MB RAM, XP Home, SP3).  Chances are your installation will go slightly faster if your computer is newer and faster than my trusty 3.5 year old laptop.  You’ll want to have the Quick-Start Guide handy when you begin the installation as that’s where you’ll find your activation code.  Be sure you have sufficient free space on your hard drive if you plan to do a full install.  The full install takes approximately 5567 MB.  Once the installation is complete, you’ll be prompted to reboot your computer.  After the reboot you can go ahead and launch BibleWorks 8 from the desktop icon or the start menu.  You’ll be prompted to activate the product.  I chose internet activation, which went through in a matter of seconds.  Following activation, you’ll be prompted to register your product.  You can do this right away, at a later time, or never.  The “Getting Started” videos come up next.  This window will appear every time you launch BibleWorks 8.  If you uncheck the box for “Show this window on startup”, they will no longer appear.  Should you want to view them at a later time, just select “Getting Started” under the Help menu.  The final step to complete the installation is to run the BibleWorks Updater.  This can be found under Help–>BibleWorks on the Internet–>Check for updates.  Chances are you’ll want to click “Select All” & then click “Apply Selected Updates”  After the updates are downloaded, BibleWorks will restart.  Please note that if you go back to BibleWorks Updater and check for updates again, it may look like you didn’t download or install any of the updates.  “Show downloaded patches” is on by default.  You can turn that off under the Options menu in BibleWorks updater.  Once you make it this far, you’re all ready to start using BibleWorks 8.  Overall, my installation took approximately 4o minutes.  I suspect installing the DVD version to a slightly newer computer will take less time.  The installation was pretty much seamless.  The only issue I ran into was with the BibleWorks Updater.  As I noted above, it appeared that the updates weren’t being installed.  By default the downloaded patches are shown in the list of updates.  You can turn that off in the BibleWorks Updater options menu.

Now that the installation is done, it’s time for me to start “playing” with BibleWorks 8.  I’ll be putting out a more formal review in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, you can learn more about BibleWorks 8 at www.bibleworks.com.