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Update on Factory Service Manual CD

7345 Views 17 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  zzkazu
Back in March I ordered a Factory Service Manual CD from TechAuthority and it turned out to be unusable on anything but older versions of Windows and only with Internet Explorer 8 or earlier.

Later versions would not render the Adobe SVGs that made up many of the wiring diagrams and illustrations.

This has now been revised and though you need Internet Explorer 10 (and can discard the Adobe plugin) it does work on Windows 8 devices and upgraded Windows 7. XP users with IE 6 will still need the plugin (included on the CD).

About 100MB of "something" has been added but the important thing is that it now works on current devices (still no Firefox, or Android, iOS, or OS/X or Chrome though). I do have to blow up to 200% to read the text on a 24" monitor but is now displayed so we can see the pinouts.

It appears to being treated as a slipstreamed update and will be used for new orders of the same part number (for 2012 WK2s it was 81-370-12064-CD ). People who bought the CD since it became available for the WK2s (in March) should be able to contact TechAuthority and request the updated CD.

The wheels grind exceedingly slow...

ps my copy does include info on the 3.0 Turbo Diesel but probably not the blue one.
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There is a new CD and I have it. The SVGs are now handled by Internet Explorer but you must have IE10.

However the one I have has the same part number and cannot be identified from the label. The directory en_US and Autorun.inf have a 9/x/2013 Date Modified as the only way to tell.
When it arrives please let us know if it has a different part number or revision notice on it. Mine is identical to the original.
Mine was same-same but some of the files/directories had a September date. Also if you can see the wiring diagrams with IE10 it is the new one (and does not need the SVG reader).

That's the good news. OTOH it does not work at all ("No Data...") with Windows 8.1 RTM and IE11.

If I didn't have to work for a living I'd just transfer all 2,494 .svgs to .jpgs & fix the 5481 .xml files. Computers are good at that.
The 2012 includes the VM diesel but must be the European or Oz spec.

Note: What follows is speculation on my part.

Have seen this sort of thing before when an inside organization is chartered to create "something" out of an existing (usually mainframe) system. An Exec looks at bids for such a project and decided that since they have all of these IT people, they can probably do it in their free time.

Of course mainframe people don't want to mess with pc stuff so they give it to the guy who mutters to himself while reading Byte. Given the style of the XML and SVG structures, I suspect the main tool used was Adobe Illustrator 15.1.0 but the XML is 1.0 which is earlier.

So "someone" decided that the easiest way to do this was to extract relevant bits of the online service manual system onto a CD.

The dealer system appears to be a multi-year, multi-element program, part of which is in a meta-index which can provide SEARCH and a vector graphics engine that supports zoom and move.

What was provided was something that could only use a specific browser (IE) that is only available in Windows. A set of search results were each transformed into HTML, XML, SVG, JPG and GIF constructs. Naming uses an encoded GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) which was probably machine generated. Certain things were left out such as the complete wiring diagram, index, and search (I had to create my own index program for fault codes).

So we have "something" that is only usable with very specific operating systems (no MAC or iOS or Android) and just one browser IE 10 (can use with earlier versions with the Adobe driver package last updated in 2009).

For some reason the whole system reminds me of the Helena Rubinstein R-390A.
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