CU6

[filkertom]

Stupid Creative.

The mobo sound clicks way too much. It could be that I haven't installed ASIO on here yet, but it just doesn't sound right. So, the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer board is back in. Can't find the disk, though.

I downloaded the right driver, installed, rebooted... and up popped something saying Would you like us to check for updates? Figuring this would get me a few apps that I wanted without me trying too hard, I said yes. Aaaaaand now it's taking an estimated two hours plus for a couple hundred MB of files from their glacial servers. With no option to cancel, and having apparently overwritten my previous install of the drivers.

If this POS slows down my computer by even a jot, I'll strip out everything but just the main driver.

Gaaaaaaaah.

So which software installs do you hate, or love? I am sick to the teeth of Apple, Divx, and a number of smaller companies having A Wonderful Plan For Your Life and being determined to inflict it on you at every opportunity. You know, like RealPlayer used to be. (The problem with Divx is that the Divx Update program crashes a lot. I've got better things to do with my processor cycles than nursemaid buggy crap updaters.) And oh my frickin Cthulhu the Native Instruments Service Center.

On the other hand, FileZilla (which has its own problems, unfortunately) and Notepad++ are amazing, installing and restarting themselves with nary a glitch. Firefox and Chrome are pretty good. And Reaper's a dream. It doesn't auto-update, but it lets you know very politely when there's a new version, and it's only a few MB download, and it installs right over it with no problem. Heh. Winamp does exactly the same thing, but somehow Winamp's update notice annoys the heck out of me where Reaper's doesn't.

ETA: Gaaaaaaaah. There's some glitch I haven't run into before, that basically hoses my card (X-Fi Xtreme Gamer) on XP SP3. Somehow, my previous install avoided it. This one hasn't, and oy is it common, frustrating, and damn near unsolvable. So I will see if ASIO4ALL will help the mobo audio.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Itunes has never gone out and updated on me - it always asks, just like Reaper does.

The clicking I've experience with ASIO4ALL. I have it set to 3 threads and it works well. But when you make a change to ASIO4ALL, you have to stop the program that uses it and restart before the change takes affect. I learned this the hard way.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Really? When I had iTunes not only did it update itself, it reinstalled itself after I removed it and re-associated all media file types to itself without my permission. I followed along on the install and made sure the right options were selected, but that didn't seem to matter. Plus, I didn't like their interface and its "I am thy Lord thy Media Player and thou shall have no other media players before ME" attitude which was demonstrated when I tried to use a different media player and got an error for the first time.

I won't put it on my new computer. (Well I got it on Halloween last year, does that count as new?) As far as I'm concerned iTunes is an iVirus.

[solarbird]

And I thought I had weird problems with computers. (It also always asks me, and hasn't undone an uninstall. Weird.)

[wingus.livejournal.com]

"I am thy Lord thy Media Player and thou shall have no other media players before ME"

Gotta admit, that cracked me right the heck up.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

I hate the Civ 5 install because the game is still not working!!

I'm home sick and I want to relax and play my game. Is that too much to ask?
(I'll go to bed soon, don't worry.)

[solarbird]

I've turned Ubuntu Studio auto-update off and don't even run it manually anymore because I got tired of spending two to three days twice a month figuring out what the hell broke my digital audio workstation and made it completely unusable this time. The answer is never the same twice!

Once Dick Tracy is done I'll do a dist update and expect to spend three to five days making it work again. Or I'll just keep it mostly network disabled and level it where it is until it breaks. Hard to say.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

This.

I made the mistake of updating my one Ubuntu notebook from 9 to 10 and _everything_ was screwed up afterwords. And I should have seen it coming because it broke things in the partial version 9 upgrades before it.

Mint Linux (an Ubuntu "flavor" so to speak) seems to have got it down to a fairly clean process and doesn't update things until they're ready to be updated. And almost never all at once. It's not given me one problem so far. (Well except the old power management in my Compaq N610c notebook.)

[raven-ap-morgan.livejournal.com]

Odd - I had problems with 9.10 on a netbook that I have that went away when I upgraded to 10.4. YMMV, I suppose (though I've found that that is generally true with a lot of computer issues...).

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Put me down as another person who hasn't had any trouble with iTunes. Only installs updates when I tell it to, the installs run so smoothly I often forget I've done them, and I never have problems using a different player. As for claims of it being a resource hog I've done side-by-side comparisons and near as I can tell the only reason most people think that is because it has everything in one place, while using several other programs spread things around so they don't seem as big, even when they use 50% to 75% more resources.

For me, iTunes works great.

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

No, wait, I tell a lie. There is one problem I have with iTunes. When your music collection gets big, as in over 4,000 songs, it will occasionally lose the link to a few. You have to go through song by song and relink them, but it's only a few songs every other month or so, as opposed to a couple other mp3 players I've tried over the years where they randomly delete songs from your hard drive or once they lose a link you can never re-link it because the program thinks it's an impossible duplication.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

I never had that problem with Media Monkey. But then MM just does music and it does it well. And my music collection is over 150 GB and 33k of songs.

(To be fair, my audio book collection is pretty big.)

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Same here, and my collection of unwatched podcasts is up to TWELVE DAYS if I watch them straight through. Most of that is from numerous NASA podcasts, in high resolution. I think Hubblecast is four days just by itself ;-)

[jenrose]

Entropia SUCKS. Huge updates all the time, by the time I cashed out and deleted the program, it was taking up nearly 10 gigs on my hard drive. TEN. It's insane.

[purpleranger.livejournal.com]

What is Notepad++?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Free, open-source replacement for the Notepad text editor in Windows (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/). Vastly more powerful. Having tabs alone makes it worth it.

[raven-ap-morgan.livejournal.com]

I've see Notepad++ - it's nice. Being a programmer, with some really intense editing needs on occasion, I use jEdit, a programmer's text-editor. It's written in Java, so it'll run on virtually anything.

[madrona.livejournal.com]

I'll be over here enjoying the light floral scent of my own farts and my Linux Mint OS.

[timewalker.livejournal.com]

What do you use Divx for? I use VLC and the Xvid codec.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm using now. Divx did not get installed this time around.

[kengr]

What kicked me off Adobe was discovering that bot only was it doing invisible updates to Acrobat reader but it was taking *days* to do it *and* slowing the system to a crawl while it was doing this.

And now Apple keeps telling me it has a bundled iTunes & Quicktime update I need to install. Two problems. First, I do not have iTunes installed nor do I want it. Second, the machine in question is running Win2k. And the version of Quicktime it is running is the last update they ever made for Win2k. *If* I try doing their update, it'll install iTunes and then tell me it can't install the update for Quicktime.

I *really* hate companies that have update checking code that doesn't include checks for OS versions. And thus offers updates that require a later OS version.

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

I use an MP3 editor called MP3Tag. It will tell me when a new version is available and offer to update itself. If I say "yes" it will shut itself down, fetch the update, install it and start itself back up again. Lovely.