I remember purchasing Microsoft Encarta thinking it would be great for my kids. They never touched it. Then there was the 100 years of National Geographic. What a nightmare that was. It came with about 30 CD-ROMs. You search for an article on Antarctica for instance and it tells you to insert Disc 23. Then if you wanted to see the photos, it told you to insert Disc 7. Then you would have read errors and have to keep re-inserting the disc so it could spin up correctly.
It ended up in a yard sale with most of my other software programs from that period. It's probably been about 20 years since I bought a piece of software that I had to install with a disc. The internet changed everything.
And a Dell (i think) once told me to place a problem disk in the freezer first! Reportedly worked for some HDs.
Ugggh i know. I wish I had back all,the money I wasted on computer stuff. We got the Encarta too- hardly ever looked through it. And another mistake was we bought higher end computers each time, only to have them outdated in a short time. Should bought mid or lower end till the power sort of,leveled off, the bought higher end- we paid way too much for,our computers thinking we needed them, but if course we didn’t need the extra power.