Dave's Rant

IMPORTANT NOTICE

In the account below, all names of products and companies are omitted to protect the guilty.

The innocent, being innocent, don't need protecting. The guilty, on the other hand, are probably extremely litigious, and I don't believe in taking that sort of a risk.

An All Too Common Experience?

Ever had this experience?

There you are, in the shop, not looking for anything in particular. Then, you see it. A brightly coloured box, quietly whispering "Buy me! Buy me!" You move closer, and the whisper becomes a shout. A shiny new CD-ROM, promising to hold every item of information in the entire world. An entire encyclopaedia through which you can browse at your convenience.

So, you pick it up, take it over to the till, and wave your plastic card under the nose of the cashier, and walk out of the shop with your new purchase. Later that same day, you boot up your computer, open up the CD-ROM's jewel case, and slip the CD into your drive.

"Do you want to install [name of product deleted]?" your computer asks.

You click the "Yes" button. It installs, no problem.

"Do you wish to start [name of product deleted]" your computer asks.

"Yes," you once again reply.

And that is where the problems start, because instead of a fancy start up screen, what actually appears on your screen is...

Nothing. Not a sausage. Kein Wurst. Pas une sauscisse.

All you see is a uniform 18% grey screen, while your mouse pointer turns to an hour glass and stays that way for a minute.

Two minutes.

Ten minutes.

Then, you get fed up and try to reboot the system. Even that doesn't work.

Well, from then on you have hours of "fun" trying to track the problem down. Does it object to your 800 x 600 x 24bit screen? You try again with 640 x 480 x 256 colour (which, incidentally, means that all the icons you've spent ages getting in exactly the arrangement you want fall off either the bottom or the right hand side of your screen). Still no joy. Is it your virus checker? That nifty tape streamer software that sits in the background ready to go at a moment's notice? The toolbar at the top of the screen. No, no, and thrice no.

After a while, you go back to the shop and complain about this worthless junk with which you've been saddled. They put it in their computer...

... well, you can guess what happens! It works, perfectly. And, of course, the shop isn't going to change anything that isn't actually faulty, are they?

All of which leaves the question of why this happened. Is it your system? Hardware or software? When you try other CD-ROMs, though, you have no problems, and that applies even to CD-ROMs from the same company and with the same driving engine. Odd.

So, the likely explanations:

There exists in this world a bewildering profusion of different sound cards and display screen cards. You simply have the one (or one of those) that the software publishers didn't allow for in software package (a), but did in software package (b).
Almost every piece of software you install has a good rummage through your system and changes .DLL, .INI files and the like. Even the uninstalling programs, while they go a long way toward helping, aren't perfect at removing all the muddy footprints from your hard drive. The odds seem good that something, somewhere, is clashing with something else.

And the solution?

That software company now has a proven track record of writing software that's incompatible with your system. No matter how attractive the packaging, do you really want to take the risk again?
Going back to the shop was a seventy five mile round trip. Do you really want that hassle again?

Either way, the solution is obvious!

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