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IP: a Wizards day of pain
From: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 16:22:41 -0500
Yesterday I bought a US Robotics bigpicture video kit. It has a nice video camera and a Hauppauge capture board plus a 33kbps modem and a pile of software. You would think that after the software US Robotics supplied with by Pilot I would have gotten smarter but the package looked so good. BTW it promised a free upgrade of the modem to DVD (HA!! that was on the box and NOWHERE inside was any sign of that promise). Anyway, I put the Boards in and proceeded to follow the instructions given in their map to installation. To say it did not work is to put it very mildly the truth. Installation drivers were not where the installation script said they should be and even when you find it it does not install well. After much pain I got the video working so I installed their application package. It is a mess -- not so much the apps which are fine but US Robotics made a mess out of the installation. Like saying to tell the script when a app was done installing but that direction often came after the app had already installed and went elsewhere. I managed to get it mostly working cept the sound part of their modem card. I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable person and it was agony for me. The average user would have a nervous breakdown. When will US Robotics ever learn how to supply working software to match their hardware. BTW they said if you have any problem go to their web page which was to put it mildly less useful then their manual and that was poor. Advice -- do what I will do and return the piece of cr__ till they learn how to make their software work. Dave ps in case anyone asks what their telephone advisers said they are only open 0-5 weekdays when I work 9or am supposed to)
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- IP: a Wizards day of pain David Farber (Feb 23)