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How to Install a Chess CD

by Steve Lopez

Readers who are familiar with my prior work will recognize this as a tired rant, but I'll trot it out again anyway: In order to use a computer properly, you need to know a little something about it. I'm not talking about terms such as "video cache" or "audio codex"; I’m referring instead to the bare-bones basics such as "file" and "folder". In this article, we're going to take a very quick, basic look at these terms (as well as one or two others) and show how these concepts relate to storing a database on your hard drive.

The first term is "file". A file is a individual package of data, simple as that. When you type a document in a program like Word and save it, that document is stored as a file (with whatever name you give it, like formletter.doc or somesuch). When you look at an illustrated webpage, you're typically viewing multiple files. One file contains the text and formatting, while each illustration is a separate file. It’s easiest to think of a file as a single physical object, much as you would think of a single sheet of paper in the "non-virtual" world.

Files are stored on your hard drive in "folders". A folder is basically just a compartment for storing files. The choice of the term "folder" is no accident, as it’s easiest to think of a computer folder as you would a manila file folder which holds sheets of paper – in fact, the standard Windows illustration for a folder on your hard drive is just that: a manila file folder.

In the above screen shot (one of the panes from Windows Explorer), we see an alphabetical list of some of the folders from a hard drive (mine, in fact). Note that folders can themselves contain folders (which are, not surprisingly, called "subfolders"). Here’s a view of some of the subfolders that are contained inside my "Bases" folder:

And when we "drill down" far enough through the folders and subfolders, we eventually come to the individual files which are stored therein. For example, here are the files I’ve stored within my "cbm" folder:

Each of these files has an "address", which is similar to your real-life street address. Just as your street address contains your state, city, street name, and your house number (thereby pinpointing your residence), a file has an address on your computer consisting of the drive letter on which it resides, the folder (and any subfolders), and finally the filename. For example, the file "cbm.cbh" in the above illustration would have the following address: C:\bases\cbm\cbm.cbh, pinpointing its location on my hard drive.

There’s a lot more to know about files and folders than this, but that’s best left to the many basic Windows tutorial books (like the famous "...for Dummies" series). For right now, this is really all you need to know to be able to install a database to your hard drive; in fact, all of the above is likely more than you need to know if you’re just going to use the default settings contained within your ChessBase or Fritz program.

In this article, we’re going to install ChessCentral’s The Big Bird Powerbase CD using three different ChessBase programs (ChessBase Light, ChessBase 8, and Fritz8). You can easily adapt the procedure to install any ChessCentral CD.

Before we start looking at specifics, I have a couple of general recommendations:

* If a CD gives you the choice between either a ChessBase format database (i.e. one in .cbh format) or a .pgn format database, install the .cbh format one; there are many options and features in the software that are either limited or entirely unavailable when you’re working with .pgn databases.

* When you install a database from a CD to a hard drive, the software will suggest a default folder address for the files. Unless you’re pretty familiar with the basic concepts of folder and file management, it’s best to just use the suggested defaults.

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