Re: registration procedure sucks

Bruce McGee wrote:
David Erbas-White wrote:

Because you've never gotten bitten by it, that's why. For those of
us who have, it's a MAJOR hurdle to overcome -- because having lost
thousands of dollars in the past due to such garbage, we won't
willingly repeat the experience.

I'd be curious to know how you lost thousands of dollars because of
this.

Seriously. It's a legitimate question.


I had a software activated CAD package for doing circuit board work. This was 'relatively' early in the days of PC PCB CAD packages. I had a ton of trouble with the product, but I had a project to complete and had no time to play around with finding an alternate package. Did one complete circuit board design with the package, then removed it from my machine and archived it.

The PCB design was for a customer who later on was quite 'important' to me. A few years later, he resurrects that board and wants some minor changes made. No problem, I thought... I'll just re-install the software (archived everything on Colorado Memory Systems 10MB tapes, you know) and still had the original disks (they were these things called floppy disks, because they were actually 'floppy' <G>). The long and the short of it is that the software could not get installed again because of the activation required, and the manufacturer of the software had been absorbed by another company that didn't care about the old products.

It cost me a few grand to get the project redone by another contractor in my 'current' (at the time) software CAD packaged, because it was worth it to me in order to not lose that customer. If I'd simply been able to load/run the software, I could have made the changes within an hour or two and been done with it. Instead, I wasted all of the time ATTEMPTING to get my old software installed, was not successful, and had to pay to convert the old design (manually) because the software wouldn't run without activation.

My choice was to loose the larger contract, or pay to get the work done (or I could have done it myself, it would still have been several grand at my 'rate' at the time). There's no excuse for that kind of nonsense, and I do my best to avoid voluntarily 'trapping' myself into similar situations.

It's a major reason why I'm still using BCB5 rather than BDS2006, even though I own both.

Irony of ironies, I was (for a time) the chief hardware engineer at one of the 'dongle' companies that makes hardware protection devices for software packages such as AutoCad...

David Erbas-White

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Can anyone recommend a good CAD package?
    ... I have been using Turbocad for more than five years. ... > one of the most intuitive CAD programs they ever used; ... >> use paper for initial planning and mockups to tune the design. ... unless and until proficiency with the CAD package exceeds ...
    (rec.woodworking)
  • Re: Can anyone recommend a good CAD package?
    ... wireframe 3D CAD package, introductory training on Unigraphics, ... > solid modeling program, and is bundled with AutoDesk Mechanical ... > use paper for initial planning and mockups to tune the design. ...
    (rec.woodworking)