Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
A while back I put a DVD burner in my home machine. It was the last of the single layer units just before double layer became affordable. It came bundled with the Sonic recording software. Seeing as I didn't plan to use it much, that was OK.
OK, Sonic sucks seriously from the point of view that it takes 18 billion years to install, but WTF, it only has to be done once, I figured. (I remember, back when lots of DVD burners used to come with Sonic, getting peple come into the shop wanting a burner fitted to their machine 20 minutes before closing time. "No worries", we would say out of habit, "just take a seat and we will do it right away". With Nero or anything else, you'd have them on their way at 5 to 5. (Sorry, for our language-challenged friends across the pond I'd better translate: that's a twelfth of five.) (For the New Zealanders, that's big hand pointing to the nine, little hand pointing to the five.)
But with Sonic, on an Athlon XP you'd be there till 10 past 5. And on some crappy old Hewlett-Packard Celeron or anything else slow, you'd finally push them out the door at something like 5:30. Sucksville!
But it didn't matter. The machine I wanted to install the burner in was an XP 2500 with all the goodies, and there was no particular hurry. It didn't matter that Sonic had some weirdo (i.e., non-Nero) user interface either: all I wanted to do was burn the occassional data disc full of JPGs for archival storage. No hu-hu. Even Sonic should be good enough for that.
Well, recently I needed to burn a heap more of them (out of space on the laptop again). And this reminded me of just how bad Sonic really is.
First, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, it goes through this great long first-time run install routine (yes, you have already installed it, and it already took ages, but now, when you run it, it fires up the Windows Installer and goes through another load of crap before it starts. Takes maybe 30 seconds, and that's on a fast machine.
Second, it turns out that this ain't actually a first time install thing. It [/i]needs to do it every single time![/i] Phenomenal! What an incredible pile-of-crap program! (It might be longer than 30 seconds, but I'm trying to be conservative. Tannin, you see, has gone a bit silly of late - secoond childhood I think - and I'm feeling the responsibility of trying to be the sensible one in the family now.)
Third, it puts an incredible pile of crap into temporary files. Like I mean huge temp files (and I'm not talking about buffers or anything, I'm just talking about the installation crap). And it doesn't clean up after itself. So, some months back when I was having an organise, I deleted the barstards. Made a heap of extra space on my C drive (which being an 18GB X15, isn't all that roomy).
Fourth, it actually uses all those temp files! Stupid program. Believe it or not, the next time I wanted to burn a DVD (which was maybe two months later) it went through its usual brain-dead Windows Installer routine and complained bitterly about not being able to find the installation files in c:\docs and settings\whatever user\temp\sonic\124 ~239-0151 (or somewhere like that)! Even stupider, if you just hit "cancel" about ten times, it eventually fires up and works as per usual - except that it says something like "unable to run Sonic Crapsville, you need to reinstall" first and when you click OK it works!
Fifth, when you eventually do get to the program itself, there are actually about three or four programs. I have no idea why, or what stupid things they are designed to do: hey, I want to burn a DVD, right? Why can't I have one program that does it? Stupid pricks.
Sixth, and possibly last, the interface itself is flashy, messy, and very, very sluggish. (God only knows what it's like on a Compaq Celeron 666 with 128MB of RAM - it's bad enough on a real computer.) Burning takes ages. (I always thought that was just DVD burners, or possibly the old Lite-On SOHW-812S, but as I discovered just now, it probably isn't.)
But there is good news. To my complete astonishment, the uninstall routine is fast, simple, and effective! It is (thank God) the only part of the entire program that works well. Really well, you don't even need to reboot.
Just now I spat the dummy (as I'd just needed to do some burning for the first time in a few months) and slipped over to the office and grabbed an LG burner (whatever the current model is) with Nero.
Oh bliss!
Nero is so much nicer to use that I can't believe the difference. And it burns a heap faster. OK, this is a 16X burner and the old one was only an 8X, but I'm using 4X discs, and it burns at 4X and the LG with Nero is nearly twice as fast as the Lite-On with Sonic!
Anyway, I guess everybody knows that Sonic is a complete pile of stinky crap, but I just thought I'd remind you all.
OK, Sonic sucks seriously from the point of view that it takes 18 billion years to install, but WTF, it only has to be done once, I figured. (I remember, back when lots of DVD burners used to come with Sonic, getting peple come into the shop wanting a burner fitted to their machine 20 minutes before closing time. "No worries", we would say out of habit, "just take a seat and we will do it right away". With Nero or anything else, you'd have them on their way at 5 to 5. (Sorry, for our language-challenged friends across the pond I'd better translate: that's a twelfth of five.) (For the New Zealanders, that's big hand pointing to the nine, little hand pointing to the five.)
But with Sonic, on an Athlon XP you'd be there till 10 past 5. And on some crappy old Hewlett-Packard Celeron or anything else slow, you'd finally push them out the door at something like 5:30. Sucksville!
But it didn't matter. The machine I wanted to install the burner in was an XP 2500 with all the goodies, and there was no particular hurry. It didn't matter that Sonic had some weirdo (i.e., non-Nero) user interface either: all I wanted to do was burn the occassional data disc full of JPGs for archival storage. No hu-hu. Even Sonic should be good enough for that.
Well, recently I needed to burn a heap more of them (out of space on the laptop again). And this reminded me of just how bad Sonic really is.
First, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, it goes through this great long first-time run install routine (yes, you have already installed it, and it already took ages, but now, when you run it, it fires up the Windows Installer and goes through another load of crap before it starts. Takes maybe 30 seconds, and that's on a fast machine.
Second, it turns out that this ain't actually a first time install thing. It [/i]needs to do it every single time![/i] Phenomenal! What an incredible pile-of-crap program! (It might be longer than 30 seconds, but I'm trying to be conservative. Tannin, you see, has gone a bit silly of late - secoond childhood I think - and I'm feeling the responsibility of trying to be the sensible one in the family now.)
Third, it puts an incredible pile of crap into temporary files. Like I mean huge temp files (and I'm not talking about buffers or anything, I'm just talking about the installation crap). And it doesn't clean up after itself. So, some months back when I was having an organise, I deleted the barstards. Made a heap of extra space on my C drive (which being an 18GB X15, isn't all that roomy).
Fourth, it actually uses all those temp files! Stupid program. Believe it or not, the next time I wanted to burn a DVD (which was maybe two months later) it went through its usual brain-dead Windows Installer routine and complained bitterly about not being able to find the installation files in c:\docs and settings\whatever user\temp\sonic\124 ~239-0151 (or somewhere like that)! Even stupider, if you just hit "cancel" about ten times, it eventually fires up and works as per usual - except that it says something like "unable to run Sonic Crapsville, you need to reinstall" first and when you click OK it works!
Fifth, when you eventually do get to the program itself, there are actually about three or four programs. I have no idea why, or what stupid things they are designed to do: hey, I want to burn a DVD, right? Why can't I have one program that does it? Stupid pricks.
Sixth, and possibly last, the interface itself is flashy, messy, and very, very sluggish. (God only knows what it's like on a Compaq Celeron 666 with 128MB of RAM - it's bad enough on a real computer.) Burning takes ages. (I always thought that was just DVD burners, or possibly the old Lite-On SOHW-812S, but as I discovered just now, it probably isn't.)
But there is good news. To my complete astonishment, the uninstall routine is fast, simple, and effective! It is (thank God) the only part of the entire program that works well. Really well, you don't even need to reboot.
Just now I spat the dummy (as I'd just needed to do some burning for the first time in a few months) and slipped over to the office and grabbed an LG burner (whatever the current model is) with Nero.
Oh bliss!
Nero is so much nicer to use that I can't believe the difference. And it burns a heap faster. OK, this is a 16X burner and the old one was only an 8X, but I'm using 4X discs, and it burns at 4X and the LG with Nero is nearly twice as fast as the Lite-On with Sonic!
Anyway, I guess everybody knows that Sonic is a complete pile of stinky crap, but I just thought I'd remind you all.
