How to Write a Superb Software Installation Guide
When in doubt, include important information in multiple guides despite the risk of redundancy and repetition
An installation guide is written to describe the installation of either a mechanical/electronics system (like a child’s swing or a hi-fi set) or a software product. Here we will focus mainly on the latter.
A software installation guide overlaps with System Administration Guide since it covers similar configuration tasks. That’s the reason why the demarcation line between these two guides may not always be very clear.
Here are the main components of a typical software installation guide:
1) System Requirements (or Prerequisites)
What kind of hardware, software and/or firmware are needed to install this software? Will it work if your Operating System is a Mac OS X, or Windows Vista? How fast your processor should be?
For example here are the system requirements for Windows VISTA OS Home Basic Edition which should be included in a Windows VISTA Installation Guide:
- 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 512MB of system memory
- 20GB hard drive with at…
