How to download and install

Pick the right transfer path

Every entry lists three paths. The direct path is the simplest and works from any connection, the backup mirror exists so a busy or broken primary does not take the title offline, and the torrent path is the one to use for anything large or on a connection that drops out regularly.

For packages measured in tens of gigabytes the torrent path is almost always the right answer. It resumes cleanly, it verifies what it has already pulled, and a transfer interrupted overnight picks up where it stopped instead of starting again.

• Direct path: fastest to start, best for anything under a few gigabytes
• Backup mirror: identical package, use it when the primary is slow
• Torrent path: best for very large packages and unreliable connections

Extract before doing anything else

Extract the archive fully before running anything inside it. Running an installer from inside an archive viewer works occasionally and fails unpredictably, usually partway through the copy stage when a file it expected beside it is not there.

Use a short extraction path with no spaces in the folder names. A path buried eight folders deep with spaces and non-English characters in it is the single most common cause of an installer that stops with an unhelpful error.

There are no archive passwords anywhere in this index. If something asks for one, it did not come from here.

Pause protection while installing

Installers of this type are flagged on heuristics rather than on anything specific found inside them. That means real-time protection will frequently quarantine a file mid-copy, which leaves a half-installed application that then fails in ways that look unrelated to the actual cause.

Pause protection before extracting, keep it paused for the whole installation, and turn it back on once the application has been opened successfully at least once. Pausing it for the first installer and forgetting the rest of a multi-application set is a common way to lose an afternoon.

Deal with older versions first

Where an entry says an older release must be removed first, remove it first. Office suites and design suites in particular fight over shared components and file associations, and a setup that has to work around an existing install often finishes reporting success while leaving something broken.

Some applications are explicitly fine side by side, and the entry says so where that is the case. Where it does not say so, assume the older release needs to go.

The usual causes, in order of likelihood

• Protection software quarantined a file during the copy stage, leaving a partial install
• The extraction path was too long, too deep, or contained spaces or unusual characters
• An older release of the same application was still present and was not removed
• A background helper process was running and held a file open during setup
• The disk ran out of space partway through, which some installers report as a generic error
• The archive was extracted from inside an archive viewer rather than to a real folder
• The machine was never rebooted after a previous installation that asked for one