Trying to install Orangebox

I'd picked up a copy of the famous Orange Box at the Dubai duty free, on the 28th.:happy: felt really good about that purchase.

Little did i know that installing it would be such a hassle :furious: . I started yesterday morning, and after multiple tries gave up and went home. am resuming the struggle now after a good nights rest. Hope i have better luck today. :awww:

For those of you who've been under an internet rock for the last 1year, heres a brief discription of the box.

Basically Valve the publisher of mega hit titles halflife and halflife2 decided to launch a few of their newer game in a single package, making them available for a lot cheaper. The games included in the orange box are halflife2, halflife2 ep1, ep2, Portal and Team Fortress2 .



their basic premise was laudable and considered the first step by a game publisher towards making games more accessible and inexpensive to users.

However, like in my case most users have had a nightmarish experience when it came to installing it.
Basically heres what happens:

1) The orange box doesn't come with any printed instructions on how to instal it, so one has to assume that its the standard "insert dvd and click the next buttons" procedure.

2) The first thing dvd#1(there are two dvds) does is install valve's Steam application. after the installation is done, you realise it happened too fast ,and couldnt have possibly installed the games themselves. However before you can do anything the steam app starts updating itself, and won't let you do much until it's done with that.

3) After Steam has updated itself it will make you login or create an account to login with. Then it shows you a bunch of promos for other valve titles. After a while it dawned on me that maybe i should take out the dvd and insert it in again.

4) When you insert the disk the second time it pops up a orangebox installation screen, where you can click to install. However when i clicked it, it started "preparing files for installation" and the progress bar was vertually stationary for an hour. After noticing that my net had drastically slowed down i realised that it wasn't reading the dvd, it was downloading the games from the online server!!!:yikes: if the games come on 2DVDs they must be a total of 8gb... i don't have the time or bandwith for that kind of download!

5) So I stopped that process and looked for an option to make it install from disc, there was none.

6) Then i decided to experiment, so i turned off my net connection and ran the dvd again. this time it gave me a "reinstall" option. when i clicked it, it finally started to install with a clear "installing from disc" message :up: . after its done with disc #1 it asks you to insert disc #2.

7) When i removed disc#1 and inserted Disc#2 it displayed a "server error" or "server busy can not continue at this time" message and aborts the installation. :ko:

Currently thats where i'm stuck.
any one know how to get around this crap?

Its almost not worth buying games anymore.:pirate: If i don't resolve this soon, i think i'll just have to go get a pirated copy off of a torrent network.