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Monster Media 1993 #2
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PERILS.TXT
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1993-05-30
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The Perils of New Software
by Wick Smith
Tokyo PC Users Group
I think it may be a sign of certain middle age that the thought of
opening a new software package no longer fills me with wild
anticipation. I remember, as perhaps you can, when ripping open that
shrink wrap was a primal act of exploration. Today it seems every
software package was produced by Pandora.
Take Aldus Persuasion. Please. Just kidding folks ... lovely
package, lovely package. What I'm talking about is the way new
software seems to screw up everything else on your system. Have you
seen an installation package lately that doesn't want to "modify"
your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS? I don't know about you, but my
AUTOEXEC.BAT is now only slightly shorter than War and Peace and
some of the passages even sound similar. In fact, my AUTOEXEC.BAT
is like one of those hundred-year-old stews where you keep adding and
stirring new ingredients but you never ever start fresh. I have l
ines in my AUTOEXEC.BAT that have been handed down from generation
to generation in our family. And I have watched in horror as
installation routines have barged their way into my heirloom and
trampled on it with their muddy feet.
But that's just the beginning. How do you feel about the trend
towards compressed distribution disks? You know, the ones where all
ten of the disks that come in the package have been compressed with
PKZip or Lharc. If everything goes just wonderfully, you're OK. But
when you later decide you need one file that you either erased or
doesn't work, you're really out of luck. The directory of the disk
tells you nothing, and unless you're lucky you have no way to get at
a single file unless you install the whole program over again, often
destroying any customization you've done in the meantime. Windows is
like that. It's not much fun trying to get a single driver or file
off one of those disks. First of all, their Expand program is
proprietary and secondly they don't tell you where the files are. In
fact, they don't tell you what any of the files really do.
One thing they certainly do is take up hard disk space. Persuasion,
which is my latest distraction, takes up around 7MB of space before
you actually do any work. Powerpoint is around 6MB and even lowly
Harvard Graphics is up around 5MB. And once the files are installed
it's next to impossible to determine which ones you need and which
you don't. People of habit, like myself, probably don't need half of
the files that get copied to the hard disk, but who wants to risk
erasing the one file that may be vital?
And speaking of erasing, new software has this diabolical resistance
to being removed from your system. It's like old chewing gum stuck to
the bottom of a cinema chair. Even if you remove every file from the
directories that it has set up for itself you're still not through
with it. It may have set up hidden and read-only files in your root
directory, changed your path, insinuated itself into your CONFIG.SYS,
and written references to itself in numerous configuration and .INI
files. Long after you thought you'd rid yourself completely of
Whoopie Graphics 2000, it will come back to haunt you.
But let's concede for a moment that you do get the software
installed, that you do have the hard disk acreage to devote to it,
and that you actually need to do what it's supposed to do. Now comes
the fun of learning it. Software today comes in a ten-pound box
filled with dense reading material. At minimum there is a pocket
command guide, a desktop reference guide, a user's manual, something
called "getting started," an installation guide, a tutorial, a
technical reference guide, a thin booklet called "read this first,"
and sometimes even a video tape. CorelDraw! even throws in a key
chain.
Ominously, there are often ten or twenty odd advertising pamphlets
and brochures included, each trying to sell you a book, cassette or
VHS tape for learning the program faster. Not a real confidence
booster. The net effect of this is to make the experience of
opening the package and getting started more like a religious ritual
than a simple operation. There are cards to fill out, invitations to
decline, license agreements to read, envelopes to open, reply cards
to be pondered. Perhaps some people are impressed with this trove of
goodies. I used to be. I used to be one of those people who
actually liked software manuals. I'd keep them by the toilet where
I could peruse them at leisure, away from the distraction of screen
and keyboard. I'd sit rapturously through passages like "To return
to the main menu, press Alt-Shft-Ctrl-M, unless you are editing a
table, in which case press Esc to bring up the transfer submenu and
choose "ain", after saving your work by pressing Ctrl-F6." But now
I'm not sure which of the eight enclosed guides is the "real" one.