The Complete National Geographic - 125 Years (1888 - 2012)

Prior to installing the software on my laptop that is a few years old I READ THE INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS which clearly states to install Adobe AIR if your computer does not have it. Done. Directions then say to USE DISC 7 FOR INSTALL. Check. Install directions also state DVD TO HARD DRIVE DOWNLOAD TIME CAN TAKE 60 - 90 MINUTES. I watched NCAA B-Ball playoffs while installing all the discs. Each took about an hour. I cannot see how one can complain about the download time when it is CLEARLY stated in the instructions, and then sit and watch it, complaining about it? LOL.Search feature is great - type in a subject, for me it was Vikings, and I had no less than two dozen articles with Vikings mentioned or featured. Some commands may run just a tad slow, but not to the point where it is frustrating.I know NG is known primarily for their stellar photography, but for twenty-some dollars I'm satisfied with the cost versus photo quality trade off. Honestly, the photo quality on the DVD's did not really bother me at all. For the price , I am fairly certain you will be pleased with the product - and all the free space if you elect to RECYCLE your NG collection.I HIGHLY recommend this product - SUPERB VALUE for historical info.

Against my better judgment, I bought this. I wasn't keen on NatGeo selling out to Murdoch. But since these magazines predate the sell out, I decided to buy it anyway. What a waste of money. I haven't encountered any adware yet, instead, I cannot load the magazines onto the computer. The program installs fine, though it first installs Adobe Air, not a problem, except it states that its installing CNG. Once that's done, it then goes on to actually install CNG. A bad bit of programming that.I opted to install the magazines on my computer (running Win7). The intent was to avoid having them scratched through constantly swapping them out. Boy was I in for a surprise. They will not install. It kept asking for Disc#1 (2010-2012). Disc 1 has 1996-2009 (which is displayed in the upper right hand corner next to Exit, so it see it!!), disc 7 has 2010-2012. A bit more bad programming. I checked for updates, I have the latest version of software. I checked for content updates. After creating an account and installing a Free Content Update, it now asks for disc 1 1953-2012. I also discovered at this time that I have to purchase the magazines for 2011 and 2012, despite having them on disc 7.As if that wasn't enough, I masochistically repeated all this BS on the laptop, which runs Win10. The exact same thing happened. To top it off, I can't uninstall it. There's no option and it does not appear in the Installed Programs list. I can uninstall Adobe Air, but not CNG. I'll have to roll my system back in order to remove it.So much for a surprise gift.

Love that there are all these years of photoss on disc, but the quality of these is very disappointing.

This is a horrible piece of Windows software. In order to avoid writing two different versions of the software National Geographic used Adobe AIR as a runtime environment. If you succeed in installing it--your chances are 50%--it's slow and clumsy. When you move from one mode to another it loses focus, so you can't control it with keystrokes. You have to click with the mouse to restore focus before you can use keyboard shortcuts. The text isn't as clear as it should be. No matter how much you zoom in the text doesn't really get sharp, but it's readable. The photographs look pretty good, but if you zoom in to examine a detail they will begin to break up. The text isn't searchable. There is an index in the package which you can use to search for articles, but you can't search for text strings within articles. When National Geographic first scanned these pages OCR software wasn't nearly as good as it is today, so they skipped that step. Too bad they didn't hire Google to rescan their archive as searchable PDFs.The first step in the installation process is to download the Adobe AIR installer and run it. That's where the trouble is likely to start. Adobe AIR is quite likely to tell you the installation finished but if you look at the log file you'll find it terminated with an error and hasn't been installed. You'll find the installation log at [Drive]:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Adobe\AIR\logs\install.log. You can open it with Notepad to see if it compleeted successfully or not.If it didn't there's a fix that worked for me. Open an elevated command prompt. I don't know why they call it that, it's just a command prompt with administrator authority. Hold down your Windows key and press X. Choose "Command Prompt (Admin)" from the menu. Change to the Downloads directory with "cd [drive]:\Users\[User name]\Downloads". Now you can try again to install AIR from the command prompt using "AdobeAIRInstaller.exe -silent". That worked for me.Once you've cleared the AIR installation hurdle, put Disk 7 in your optical drive. If you wait long enough Windows will probably ask you what you want to do with the disk. Choose "Install the Complete National Geographic". Pop a movie in your DVD player and relax, but stay in view of the computer. The process is slow but there are periodic prompts to which you have to respond. It starts with the usual questions about accepting the terms of the license and where to install the program. Then it runs for a while and finally stops and asks "Are you sure you want to install this software?" Then it runs quite a while before asking you to change to Disk 1. It will offer to install content updates, but you have to register an account with National Geographic. One update is free, one has to be purchased if you want it.Now you need to decide if you want to copy the DVDs to your hard drive for faster access. If you don't you can search the index and when you click on "Read the article" you'll be prompted to insert the appropriate disk. For most of us that's probably good enough. But if you want access to all the articles all the time you can spend one or two hours per DVD copying them to your hard drive. Since I can burn a complete copy of a DVD in about ten minutes that's really poor performance. It seems National Geographic went out of their way to make their software hard to use. I would have expected better of them.Once you get the software installed, you'll have a great library of National Geographic articles at your disposal. The index is pretty good, but not perfect. If you search on "Erie Canal" you'll get two hits. If you search on "New York Barge Canal" you'll get another. Since the Erie Canal is part of the New York Barge Canal system all three articles should turn up on either search. With time you'll get familiar with the index's quirks and be able to use it pretty effectively.The content itself, of course, is great. A 125 year archive of National Geographic articles is a historical treasure. When you read a current article about some place it's great to be able to check back and see what has been written about it previously. Despite the poor software quality it was well worth the $15 and change I paid for it.