The good news is a bunch of Autodesk 2014 applications and suites are now available for download. The bad news, based on my experience, is getting them may not be so easy. It must be said I do live in a country at the end of the world not famed for its Internet connectivity but still…
Subscription not quite ready for Windows 8
The 2014 applications have been built for Windows 8 but the site where you get them isn’t. With the IE10 browser in Windows 8 the instant you start typing in the User ID or Password sign in fields the entire panel, outlined in red below, disappears.
I found this is just a graphic problem and if you keep typing (use tab between fields) then hit enter the subscription site opens correctly. If you get your details wrong a new page loads with just the sign in panel and it works normally too! Once inside there everything appears to work normally.
The download manager which doesn’t manage
There is an option to install a download manager. I found this to be less reliable, if maybe quicker than the browser, and lacked the one feature I expect a download manager to have. You can pause/restart downloads but if it fails, and I learnt this by experience several times, there is no recovery or resume to save downloading the entire file again.
Another thing I found confusing is the website shows the compressed file size, 15.4GB for my suite, but the download manager reports the uncompressed 58GB size as it receives the file.
Browser download not a pop-up free zone
Browser download was more reliable (for me) but comes with a potential snag. The suite I was downloading is packaged as a multi-part zip file and for the first attempt I only got part 1, just 4GB of the 15GB I was expecting.
It seems hard to believe given the ubiquity of pop-up blockers that the browser download relies on pop-ups but it does (thank you @ScottMoyse!). I wondered if it was another Windows 8 thing but after disabling the pop-up blocker IE10 downloaded the components with none of the failures I experienced from the download manager.
So after a couple of hours I finally got the package I needed and it was time to install. That is another saga I’ll save for a future post as I have a GP2 race to watch!
