Why oh why oh why?


I've posted before on the joys of software upgrades, well my experiences this weekend really take this biscuit. As I may have mentioned before two of my hobbies are taking photographs and making home movies - not just home moves in the sense that I just film the family, I recently filmed the Remembrance Day parade and cut into it a 1940 Britain At War documentary the results of which are quite moving, even if I say so myself! I use a Sony camera and Sony Vegas Studio software for turning the home movies into something a little more presentable, with music, titles, photographs etc - I think I use it to take my mind off the less creative parts of my life.

Anyway, for the past two years or so I've been burning the films onto CD-RW's for viewing on the television, this summer I decided that DVD's would be better in terms of quality. I went for an external DVD writer made by LG, it's a multi-writer version which means that you can burn every sort of disc imaginable including CD's, DVD's, Photo Discs, etc, whereas the internal writer on my computer was only capable of CD-R's and CD-RW's. I found the one I wanted and decided I would buy it for myself for Christmas, £70, was the best price - anyway I found one in PC World a fortnight ago for £35, this despite the fact that a leading electrical retailer (as they say in advertising land) was still selling the same products for £70 a mile or so away.

Installation was simple, the usual plug and play via a USB 2.0 cable and I was up and running within minutes, I didn't bother to install the software that came with it because I already owned an earlier version of the software to burn my CD's - still with me? Anyway this Saturday I decided I would install the new software because it had one or two new facilities that appealed to me - big mistake! The new software had to replace the existing software, not merely enhance it - the software that had been running for over two years without a single problem was now replaced by something that wouldn't even allow me to do the basic burning. The DVD software insisted that there wasn't enough capacity on the DVD that I'd put in the machine and kept crashing the software. I decided to completely remove the new software and re-install the old software - another big mistake! In deleting the old software the new software had removed one of the key components which the old software couldn't re-install! This deletion and re-installation palaver continued until finally at three o'clock on Sunday morning I gave in and went to bed.

Getting up early on Sunday, after less than three hours sleep, I decided to try once more with the newer version of the software and hey presto, the movie wasn't exceeding the capacity of the DVD and I burned our Paris holiday movie. Whilst waiting for this task to be completed I decided to access the new software manual and there among the small print is the phrase 'not available on the cut down version of this product.' So I've deleted the full version for a cut-down version and didn't know that until the disc was loaded and installed and had over-written the old full version. Boy, thank Span for the Python reference as this debacle when combined with the England Rugby Union defeat had left me tired and exhausted - at least a bloody good laugh can help make you look on the bright side of life, as somebody (nearly) once sang.

P.S - In one of those wonderful moments of computer related irony I finished typing this and my Internet connection went dead! Fortunately I had cut and pasted the piece above as soon as the 'lost connection' warning appeared.