With my recent purchase of a new Athlon64 motherboard and PCI Express graphics, I have been buried under an unprecedented avalanche of bundled software.<\/p>\n
Let’s take an inventory, shall we? I’m going to include the bundled software that came with other hardware I had already, but which will be used with this system.<\/p>\n
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard:<\/p>\n
MSI NX6000GT graphics board (enough bundled software to choke a horse):<\/p>\n
Plextor PX-712A DVD Burner:<\/p>\n
Canon i960 Printer:<\/p>\n
Canon EOS-20D:<\/p>\n
Sony DCR-TRV38 Camcorder:<\/p>\n
I think that’s just about it. Am I actually expected to install all that crap? Much of it is, truly, crap.<\/p>\n
Consider the motherboard optimization utilities. There are three of them: \tnVidia nTune, ASUS Ai Booster, and AMD Cool’n’Quiet. I don’t know what they all do, or if they can be used together. I know Cool’n’Quiet is incompatible with one of the other two (not sure which).<\/p>\n
I have no less than four firewalls now. The one bundled with XP SP2, the Norton Firewall, and two NVIDIA firewalls (one hardware and one software). I have disabled all of them, since I have an external Linksys firewall anyway. I would have liked to run the NVIDIA firewalls, because they seem extraordinarily powerful, but they cause an inexplicable problem with Norton LiveUpdate. So much for that.<\/p>\n
Two different anti-virus solutions: Norton Antivirus (included in Norton Internet Security), and Trend Micro PC-Cillin.<\/p>\n
Two copies of both WinDVD and WinDVD Creator. ImageMixer does the same thing as WinDVD Creator. And then there’s Windows Movie Maker, which comes with XP Professional. I also have MGI VideoWave, which does the same thing again, from a Firewire card I bought for my studio PC. Four video editing programs to choose from. All of them suck. (I’m assuming WinDVD Creator sucks, I haven’t installed it. I’m assuming Windows Movie Maker sucks, it’s Microsoft.)<\/p>\n
In the Photo Album category, we have Photoshop Album SE, 3D-Album LE 2.03, PhotoSuite 5 SE, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I won’t bother with any of them. I have never found any Photo Album software to be worth the vinyl it’s stamped on. They all make the same fundamental mistake so much bundled media software makes: trying to “simplify” things for the user by layering their own simplistic file system on top of the perfectly usable file systems the OS provides. I will write another rant about this one of these days.<\/p>\n
Two different backup packages here: Dantz Retrospect, and RestoreIT! Professional. I will have to take a look at those. I’ll need some decent backup solution. Of course, Windows provides one as well, which has the advantage that you’ll always have it available to read your backups.<\/p>\n
In the useless-fluff category, we have \tASUS Screen Saver, MSI Media Centre Deluxe II, MSI 3D Desktop, MSI 3D Turbo Experience, Supreme Foreign Language Learning Machine, Easy-WebPrint 2.0, and ZoomBrowser EX. These are all unlikely to ever be installed, even out of curiosity. Every installation on a Windows PC hastens the day when it becomes so unstable that you have just format and reinstall. Windows Bit Rot disease. I’m not going to bring that day closer, just to see this crap.<\/p>\n
Finally, in the “what the hell does this do?” category, there is InterVideo Disc Master 2, MSI 3D Turbo Experience, MSI GoodMEM, MSI LockBox, MSI WMIinfo, MSI SecureDoc. Most of these MSI things come with not so much as a README.TXT file to indicate what they might be for. Perhaps I’ll google them later.<\/p>\n
GoodMEM supposedly “helps you increase your physical system memory size”, a claim which fills me with deepest suspicion. Software that increases my memory size? What the hell kind of snake oil is this? Let me guess… it’s some kind of memory-enhancement sticker I can apply to my RAM sticks? Uses quantum resonance effects to oxygenate the wavelength of the photons, thus enhancing the charge storage ability of the memory quarks? Something like that? I think that would work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With my recent purchase of a new Athlon64 motherboard and PCI Express graphics, I have been buried under an unprecedented avalanche of bundled software. Let’s take an inventory, shall we? I’m going to include the bundled software that came with other hardware I had already, but which will be used with this system. Asus A8N-SLI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}