The Installation Starts But Never Finishes
Problem: I started the installation, but after 20 minutes nothing seemed to be happening so I gave up. What do I do now?
Solution: This is rarely seen on Mac computers because the eViewer (Thayer Birding) program is installed first and then the Raven Lite program is installed later on. On Windows computers the Raven Lite and the Thayer Birding eViewer are both installed together during the initial installation. Unfortunately, the Raven Lite installation screen can cover up the Thayer eViewer installation screen and prevent the program from continuing the normal installation. The Windows installation begins by asking you to accept the licensing agreement and enter your 16-digit license key. The Thayer Birding eViewer installation then pauses to install Raven Lite. This is a separate program provided free of charge by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Raven lite lets you see the patterns of bird songs and manipulate bird songs in very interesting ways. The Raven Lite installation screen MAY BE HIDDEN BEHIND ANOTHER SCREEN during the installation process. This will happen fairly early during the installation. The install program just seems to stop. In fact, it is waiting for you to click "OK" but you cannot see this screen! You should drag the top screen sideways to see if there is another screen behind it. When you see the other screen, just click the OK button and things should proceed normally. Or you can also click Alt-Tab to scroll through your open screens. Or you can see the open screens by looking at the icons at the bottom of your computer screen, to the right of the Start icon. If your computer seems "frozen" just click on the Raven Lite installation icon down there and finish installing it. The Raven Lite icon will then disappear and you can click the eViewer screen to continue the full installation. (The installation of Raven Lite takes about one minute or less.)
The installation of the entire birding program will take 15-40 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer. Remember, all the photos, songs, maps and videos are being copied to your computer's hard drive. We have noticed that towards the end of the installation, it is common to hear a "grinding noise" coming from the DVD drive or the computer's hard drive and the progress bar seems to freeze. THIS IS NORMAL. There is nothing wrong. Your computer is just copying a LOT of videos to your hard drive and it is working like crazy! Please go away and come back in half an hour and everything will be fine! Trust me!
In very rare cases the program may need to install an entire .NET framework on your Windows computer. This is a new underlying computer structure used by almost every software program written for Vista or Windows 7. If you have not installed any new software in a very long time, our birding software may be the first that requires this. This can take up to 20 minutes to install.
We did hear from one person who had trouble installing the program. He tried again, but the second time he selected "Custom Installation" instead of "Full Installation." He then installed the spectrogram (Raven Lite) and then the eViewer (the main program.) He reported that this worked perfectly!