How to Write a Software Installation Guide
© 2009-2010 Ugur Akinci
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
- 512 MB of system memory
- 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
- Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
- DVD-ROM drive
- Audio Output
- Internet access
