So my windows XP gone mildly kaput again. Thumbnails are evil. Thumbnails became evil suspiciously close to the time I had about 50 different free/shareware things installed then had to uninstall and find another one.
Good grief. If you’re going to market your trial DVD authoring software as “fully functional for 30 days!” and it’s not bloody fully functional, then I am not going to buy your product. End of.
If I then have to uninstall said product because a) It won’t burn, b) It has a stupid bigass watermark in the centre which you didn’t tell me about when I read your site, or c) It crashes mid burn and wastes a DVD/Won’t play on DVD players, wasting me a DVD, and the program doesn’t uninstall itself correctly, I am not going to buy your product.
How difficult is it to put “Works for 30 days, fully functional with watermark” or “Fully functional for burning .ISOs but full purchase needed for DVDs” or at least one of those little checkboxes saying what you can and can’t do without wrecking my computer in the process, providing stupid crashy shell extensions or not removing them properly in install, resulting in my having to download and insall freeware (Its called “ShellExView” btw, seems to work well) without opening any folders and crashing Windows Explorer to remove your problem. And even then, thumbnails still make explorer crash (and no, not thumbnails of .avi’s, I’ve googled already and that’s all it came up with)
All I wanted to do is get software that makes simple menus for DVDs, and with short notice at that. If there’s no way to get it on the DVD, then that’s a problem. I’m not paying £50-150 for software I needed once or twice.
So I give up, after uninstalling all of said products and attempting to fix all corrupt uninstalls. I put all my animations in one sequence and my tutors had to live with that, because getting on a mac at college at that stage in time is impossible (which is what happens when you give us a surprise exercise 2 weeks before the deadline!)
And a month later, it’s doing it again. I’ve ‘worked around’ it by defaulting everything to list/details but I shouldn’t have to. Hell, at least back then Windows Explorer could be started up again by using “New Task” in the Task Manager (Type “Explorer” as new task, don’t even need the .exe), now it just consumes 50% resources without actually becoming visible on the desktop.
So maybe it’s a new problem. But it’s suspicious. Avast is coming up clean, so is Spyware S&D, and ZoneAlarm hasn’t screamed anything at me recently apart from asking for permissions of programs I have set to ask for. Google hasn’t helped so far. And damnit all this reading just to find “There’s a corrupt video file/divX” (considering this happens when I open a folder of shortcuts) when I can’t actually see the screen that is getting somewhat tiring.
But even if it’s unrelated, the fact that I spent hours downloading and uninstalling trial software I was mislead as being “fully functional” pisses me off. Maybe if they did thorough testing and sorting of bugs, I’d think “Hey, that shareware was good, that company is more thoughtful than others, maybe if they sell something I need I’ll get it.”
On a side note, on my old comp, I installed anti-virus (I’ll have to look up the name, it had a target board as an icon though), scanned my comp, it found something and abruptly crashed, and from then wouldn’t start up and also had a corrupt uninstall so I couldn’t get rid of it. Shite programming, or did the suspicious virus/trojan/whatnot it found blow it up? (And I still have yet to be rid of it, but I’ll sort my dad/sis’s comp out when they actually TELL me which of the 200-odd programs on their 60 gig harddrive they want rid of since I can’t actually open “Add/Remove Programs” unless in Safe Mode. More dodgy uninstalls there? Some from full games too, not freebies/share…bies? )
No Comments on "Trial software the suck."