Happy 2013 to you all! A quick shout out to the Director of the Alice Project at Carnegie Mellon, Wanda P. Mann, for being selected by ACM as a 2012 "Distinguished Educator":

http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/december/dec18_dann.html

To start off this new Coder Dojo year, I spent my time off putting together an Alice "Best Practices" resource guide to make sure everyone can load and maintain this cool animation programming. I've personally had some computers in labs not install or load the software, so I know how frustrating that can be. I hope the information below gives you enough help to troubleshoot. But, of course, feel free to contact me so we can put heads together, if you run into an especially tricky situation:

Alice installation and Windows 8

*Download the zipped file to the desktop
*Unzip on the desktop
*Move the unzipped folder to the "Program Files" (X86) folder on the c: drive
*Create an Alice short cut on the desktop

Windows 7 and above all have malware software that can interfere when trying to install software like Alice directly onto your computer's hard drive, which is why unzipping from the desktop files, then moving to the hard drive folder can be the best approach.

Minimum hardware specifications your computer needs to load Alice:

http://help.alice.org/w/page/54959064/System%20Requirements

*1GB RAM (though 2GB is best)
*VGA graphics card capable of high (32 bit) color and at least 1024x768 resolution
*3D video card, while not required, will improve performance
*Sound card

Alice Forums (you need to create an account)

http://www.alice.org/community/index.php

Troubleshooting links:

http://www.aliceprogramming.net/hints.htm

http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=faq#MachineReq