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Unofficial LDOCE patch

Added May 2012: See here for a better solution to problems with the LDOCE.

It appears there is an unofficial patch which fixes many of the LDOCE’s shortcomings (thanks are due to my readers who told me about it). Here are the main fixes:

  • Mousewheel scrolling works (still a little too slow for my liking).
  • Keyboard scrolling is fixed for the most part (there are still occasional problems with PgUp)
  • You can select any text and right-click it to copy it to the clipboard.
  • The PopUp mode window can now be resized. This is probably the most convenient way to use LDOCE, as it has very few distractions. I’ve noticed that in the PopUp mode, LDOCE tries to look up every piece of text you copy to the clipboard. To turn this off, you have to right-click the QuickFind icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen) and choose Exit.
  • You now get the dictionary window immediately after startup rather than having to click Dictionary.

The only big problem that hasn’t been fixed is the startup time. It still takes about 10 seconds to open the dictionary.

Installation

Installation is not a one-click affair, so I would not recommend it to inexperienced PC users. Perhaps you can ask your friendly neighborhood geek. Here are the steps:

  1. Get the patch (RAR archive) from here.
  2. Extract the archive to some folder. If you have 7-zip, you can right-click the archive file, then choose 7-Zip, Extract here. You can download 7-zip for free.
  3. Open the folder where you extracted the archive. Inside it, find the chrome folder.
  4. Locate the LDOCE program folder. It’s usually at C:\Program Files\Longman\LDOCE5. You should see a chrome subfolder in it.
  5. Copy the chrome folder from the patch folder to the LDOCE program folder, so that it overwrites the original chrome folder.
  6. Windows will ask you a number of questions. You want to replace files in the original chrome folder. You may have to provide administrator credentials to do this.

Otherwise…

You can use the online version of the LDOCE, which is probably easier for inexperienced users.

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