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Reinstalling Brainstorm
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Posted by Wolfgang
Oct 3, 2012 at 12:22 AM
Help. I have noticed that my Brainstorm sw, the 2008 3.6 version displayed that it was a evaluation version. I don’t know how long it has been doing that, but I have had a license for this programme for a long time. Every attempt to reinstall it on win 7 has failed. Actually, the software installs, but when I enter my user name and registration code it fails to register and still maintains that it is in evaluation.
Can anyone help, or has anyone had a similar experience.
I use this software a lot and it would be a hardship to be without it. ( I don’t want to use CT or any other outliner instead of this, so please don’t suggest alternatives - I also own licenses for a legion of “outliners” and almost all the mindmapping programmes that are extant. I keep coming back to Brainstorm.
I have tried win 95, win xp sr 2 win xp sr3 compatibility modes, this doesn’t change the problem.
Wolfgang
Posted by tradercclee
Oct 3, 2012 at 02:34 AM
I just checked, and I have the same version.
It registers fine. I’m on Windows 7.
Have you tried emailing brainstormsw.com?
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 3, 2012 at 09:09 AM
I’ve been considering buying a Brainstorm licence recently. Would any of the long-term users mind sharing some ideas of what they use it for?
I was thinking of using it for coming up with a final structure (outline) for my PhD and its individual chapters in a top-down manner. I already have other software to develop a detailed bottom-up outline but that is likely to contain more information than I probably need.
I thought using Brainstorm’s view could help focus my attention on the large themes, as it shuts out all the clutter. Do you think Brainstorm could be used like that?
I am however a bit concerned about the price and also how it’s going to fare in a Win8 etc. environment, considering that it’s no longer developed.
Posted by JBfrom
Oct 3, 2012 at 10:29 AM
Here’s how I’d do it:
Take all the stuff *I’ve* written about my paper. So no copied research. Dump it all into Brainstorm.
Then start sorting, 6 categories per layer, until I had the entire thing outlined.
It’s mindless, fast, and the result is an organized paper structure.
In my opinion, there’s no better way to create structure.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 3, 2012 at 10:07 PM
Wolfgang wrote:
>Every attempt to reinstall it on win 7 has
>failed. Actually, the software installs, but when I enter my user name and
>registration code it fails to register and still maintains that it is in evaluation.
Wolfgang,
I’ve been using Brainstorm for a couple of years on two separate Windows 7 PCs and I’ve never had this issue. In fact, I consider Brainstorm’s resilience over evolving Windows versions (I believe the latest build was out before Windows Vista were available) a sign of good workmanship, as its speed and low resource consumption which put contemporary programs to shame. That doesn’t mean that it’s not without problems, but I don’t think that the installation issue you’re facing is inherent to Brainstorm.
I did face a similar issue once when trying to install Brainstorm under Wine in Linux. I suspect that it has to do with writing rights in the Program Files directory. Are you on Windows 7 64-bit by any chance? They have a “Program Files” directory for 64-bit programs and a separate “Program Files (x86)” for 32-bit ones, such as Brainstorm, and this sometimes causes issues.
My proposed solution is to uninstall Brainstorm completely and re-install it and register it on a USB drive with the portable install option. In fact, I would suggest that you install it on a separate PC (ideally on Windows XP) and then use it from the USB drive. You may then even be able to copy the whole portable directory to your main PC’s hard disk (on a non-Program Files directory) and run it from there. You can manually create a shortcut on your desktop to the .exe file to make it more convenient to run.
Hope this helps.
Dr Andus,
Re my uses for Brainstorm, they are too many to count, ranging from text development to mailing list management (its auto identification of duplicates is fantastic for such chores). I would agree with the main idea in JB’s message, that Brainstorm excels in making order out of chaos. The size and complexity of information that it can help organise is quite remarkable. However, for what you have in mind, I believe that any outliner supporting hoist, to help keep you focused, should do nicely.
By the way, if my information is correct, and they come from a reliable source, we should not consider Brainstorm abandonware yet. Here’s hoping for the best.