I’m growing less impressed with MSI… the video card is fine, no problems there. But all this bundled software… it takes me time to investigate all this stuff to see if any of it is worthwhile. So far, it’s almost universally crap. Why are they wasting my time with this? Would it kill them to just give some small indication what these things are for, so I wouldn’t have to go digging to figure out how useless it all is?

MSI 3D Desktop

I guess it’s a… well, a 3D desktop. Some screenshots would help give me some idea about it… but there aren’t any anywhere to be found. Nor have I found any reviews. Did anybody ever install this thing, and actually put it into use?

ThinSoft BeTwin

Lets you make your PC handle multiple simultaneous users. Install a video card for each user, plug all the mice and keyboards into a USB hub. BeTwin will take care of giving them completely independant sessions. Somehow.

Useless, to me anyway.

E-Color 3Deep

There are two 3Deeps. One is a boy band. The other is monitor colour-correction software. Apparently the idea is to adjust colours so you can see in shadows and such in your 3D shooters and kick all the ass.

Apparently 3Deep is now sold under the name ColorWizzard.

But… right click on the background… colour correction, and much more, is there already in NVIDIA’s drivers. What does this do that is different? I have no idea. I’m going to have to say “useless.”

MSI 3D Turbo Experience

From MSI’s site:

• Fancy, Game-looking HTML/Flash Based Tool
• New revolution! MSI is the worldwide first company to propose the advantage of HTML/Flash based utilities. By leading the new software trend, MSI devotes to serve the users a fancy, game- looking utility. Are you ready for the new experience now?

Ok… but… what is it? This is apparently a driver of some sort. It’s exact purpose seems to be a secret for which I do not have the required high-level security clearance. But, at the risk of attracting the wrath of the black helicopters, I will say that I found one page that seemed to suggest that it was for overclocking (the video board, presumably), and that it only worked with an MSI motherboard.

And, again, there are already extensive overclocking options on the NVIDIA display settings dialogs. So, what is this thing doing differently? Are they compatible? I have no idea.

I just gotta say it… useless.

MediaRing Dialer

As far as I can tell, this is a voice-over-IP system. What this has to do with video is beyond me. Seems useless. For some reason, most of the Google hits for this are warez sites with cracks.

MSI GoodMEM

According the very short documentation provided, “GoodMEM is a program which helps you increase your physical system memory size, and monitors your memory usage.” Yeah, right. All I can see that it does is free up allocated memory. Maybe I’m dense, but I don’t get it. You can’t just free memory that is allocated… whoever allocated it is using it! Otherwise, it would have been freed already. I can hardly imagine a better way to crash a system than to free memory that somebody is using.

Am I missing something? Then tell me what it really does, and how. Until then… useless.

MSI LockBox

From the readme: “With LockBox you can leave your computer unattended at any time and not worry about anyone prowling through your files , just click.” So, this program is apparently a one-click version of Ctl-Alt-Del: Lock Computer.

C’mon, do we really need this? I presume it’s going to take up more valuable space in my overcrowded system-tray to give me this silly icon to click on.

Incredibly useless.

MSI SecureDoc

I hardy know where to begin with this one. “SecureDoc is a program that could allow you to encrypt the files, this program is compatible with the file manager.” It could indeed allow you encrypt files… if you were foolish enough to trust it. MSI doesn’t give you much reason to.

Anyone who knows anything about cryptography knows one thing above all else: it’s really bloody hard to do it right. At every turn, you’re faced with a choice between the easy and obvious way, or the correct and secure way. But this program seems particularly half-assed to me.

“Secure DOC is using the international standard for encryption.” Yeah? Which international standard? Apparently the files will be encrypted with a password. They say they are using a 128-bit “international standard” encryption scheme. This raises the question… how do they get from the presumably very short and usually very human-readable password to the necessary 128-bit encryption key? This right here could be a major weak point in this thing. Do this part wrong, and your effective security will only be a tiny fraction of what an “international standard” 128-bit scheme should provide.

“If the user need to change the password to the encrypted files, user should know that the old password will still exist in the encrypted files.” I don’t claim to be any kind of expert in cryptography… but c’mon… you don’t include the encryption key in the encrypted file! This is just so wrong… man… I can’t find words for it…

“…there is no other program that could crack the encypted files.” No respectable cryptographer would ever make such an absolute claim as this. Especially not one who knew he was storing the encryption key in the file.

And, for a last little bit of puzzlement, we have this head-scratcher: “Note: Windows system files, hidden files and read me files cannot be encrypt.” Huh? It should be obvious to anyone that encrypting the system files would be serious bonehead move. But… readme files can’t be encrypted? Why the hell not?

More than useless. Downright dangerous.

MSI WMIInfo

I guess it’s a plug-in for Windows Management Information. Not really sure why I would need this.

ShowShifter

This seems to be PVR-type application. Seems very low-end, judging by the screenshots, and the price. But it could be ok. But my computer is nowhere near my TV, so I don’t need anything like this.

Trend Micro PC-Cillin

Anti-virus, spam filter, anti-spyware, etc. Probably pretty good. But… why is this on a video board support CD?

Anyway, my ASUS motherboard came with Norton Internet Security, so I installed that.

---

There’s a bunch more stuff included with this card. But I’m tired now.