I know I’m complaining here, but National Geographic seems to have done this wrong. I purchased The Complete National Geographic — 110 Years of National Geographic on CD-ROM a few years ago. The collection of 36 CDs is an archive of every page of every issue published from 1888 through 1998. It was a joy to explore that archive, but let’s face it, I wasn’t spending every night doing it. Today I got the notion to reinstall it to search for something, but discovered that the application is far out of date and no bug fixes are available.
Let me be clear. I’m not looking for updates of the magazine content, I’m looking for updates to the application that allows me to view and search the magazine content. The NGS’s position is that I must now purchase the entire collection again:
There have been four previous iterations of the National Geographic Complete package (108 Years, 109 Years, 110 Years and 111 Years), and each was released by different companies. All are incompatible with each other and act as stand-alone products. Some were 16-bit (and thus incompatible with our current 32-bit version), others were just constructed differently by the companies contracted to produce them over the past few years.
Unfortunately the only solution for this is to purchase National Geographic: 10 Legendary Years. This will bring any version you own up to the year 2000. However, this too will be a stand-alone program (the 10 Legendary Years). It will not be accessible via your older National Geographic program.
So for example if you have the National Geographic 108 Years — it ends at 1996. For any years up to 1996 you could use your original program, but to view the years 1997-2000 you would need to open the 10 Legendary Years program separately. And yes, since the 10 Legendary Years product also includes the years 1990-1996 there will be some overlap.
The only way to have a complete and fully integrated product is to purchase the current full set, National Geographic 112 Years. We apologize for any inconvenience.
It seems NGS won’t even offer me a way to pay for an upgrade to the application that will work with current OSs. So now I have now options but to throw three pounds of CDs into the landfill.