Educational software - no copy protected

March 26, 2007 5:16 PM

Can anyone recommend educational children's software, for grades 1-3 or so, that's not copy-protected?

It's sure annoying to purchase retail software and go to install it, only to find out that it's copy-protected. We're running Windows Vista. I'd like to find education programs for my primary school children, mainly reading and arithmetic (other school subjects fine, too). I'm just a parent of a 5 and 8 year old, not a school. I'm not going to pirate anything and I'm willing to pay full price. I just don't want to buy software where you have to have the CD-ROM in the drive to run it. I want to install it to the hard drive and have it run from there with the CD-ROM drive empty.

And of course, I'd like it to be a well-written program that kids like to use.

posted by richg to Education (6 answers total)

Have you considered a CD emulator? Something like Virtual Clone Drive makes it quite simple to rip all the kids game CDs to files and mount them as needed.
posted by Riemann at 5:50 PM on March 26, 2007

Alcohol
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 6:24 PM on March 26, 2007

Forget about software. The best computer-assisted learning for kids is online at Starfall.com. It beats anything else I've seen, hands down. And it works.
posted by Pastabagel at 6:57 PM on March 26, 2007

My kids love this and it's free! They also update with new games and puzzles periodically.
posted by Sassyfras at 8:45 PM on March 26, 2007

Thanks for the suggestions. I do have some older software and I will search for more.
posted by richg at 4:52 PM on March 27, 2007

DAEMON Tools has be designed to deal with this problem, and it is free.
posted by Chuckles at 7:51 PM on March 27, 2007