Though a scanner, darkly
Forget the Oscars, it's time for the prestigious Shit Software Of The Year award. Competition has been fierce, but we have a worthy winner! First, though, the traditional pseudo-suspense of announcing the runners up...
In third place is the ever-popular Windows XP-version software for the Belkin USB Wifi Adapter. Or, to be more exact, the installer for the Belkin USB Wifi Adapter. This installer is a splendid thing to behold - spiffy Flash animation and funky graphics and and an instruction manual and everything. Unfortunately, it consistently hangs and freezes approximately three seconds after clicking the beautifully-rendered "Install" button. Note to developers: Entertain the idea, just for a second, that all the time you spent creating those lovely animated graphics might have been better deployed writing something that actually managed to install the wretched thing.
In second place is the hire-management software we use at Container World, which, by and large, does its job verging on the adequately. However the one time I tried to update it to a newer version, it crashed so hard that it not only took out the entire program and its database, but also killed Windows stone dead, requiring the company we lease the software from to fly a member of staff up from Englandshire to reinstall Windows, reinstall the software and restore the entire database from backup. Quality stuff! Imagine if the fine people at Firefox had to do that every time someone updated!
But for sheer consistency of uselessness, the winner is the software for the HP Scanjet 5590 scanner. This week, Other-A has been on holiday, and I have been using her computer. Other-A fears computers deeply - as do the rest of the CW gang - and as a result, her Toshiba laptop remains in exactly the same condition it was when I first set it up for her about 2 years ago, ie, everything is 2 years out of date. So I set about updating it. I updated the anti-virus, which had expired about a year ago, and then I accepted Windows irritating nag suggestion to update to Internet Explorer 8 - because, despite the fact that I have installed Firefox on all the CW computers, the CW gang fail to use it because it scares them - and then I tried to scan something, using the two-years-out-of-date HP Scanjet software, and it refused to work.
Which didn't surprise me in the slightest.
Because a couple of years ago, the same thing had happened with Internet Explorer 7. HP eventually fixed that particular bug some months later, but it didn't take long for me to join the dots between IE8 and my now non-functioning HP scanner software.
Fortunately I had a somewhat newer version of the software, downloaded from HP's website, which I kept for situations like this, and which had worked on some other computers. I'd kept it because it was 200MB, and you don't want to be downloading 200MB files on a regular basis if you can help it, so I installed it, and all the peripheral shit that comes bundled with it which you have absolutely no need for duly appeared, but for some reason the actual main scanner software was MIA.
*Sigh*
Off to HP's website, to get the very newest version, which at least wasn't 200MB. It was 300MB.
That sound you're hearing, HP - that long, throaty scream followed abruptly by a wet, squishy thud? That is your customers on dial-up throwing themselves off the nearest tall building.
Anyway, one 300MB download later - which only took an hour and a half because we have a reasonable-ish broadband connection - and I had the very newest version, which installed without problem, and got on very nicely with IE8 and didn't sulk or hide. The only problem was that it couldn't detect the scanner.
*Sigh*
Its helpful suggestion was that I re-ran the installer, so I did. The 300MB monster unpacked itself again, which in itself took about 5 minutes, and opened in a flurry of animated Flash graphics which would have made the Belkin developers green with envy, and announced that I now had the option to uninstall! Which I did, during which process it became apparent that in order to make things work as they should, I had to unplug the scanner from the computer, uninstall, reinstall and then plug the scanner in, at which point the software would graciously acknowledge its existence. Windows was nowhere to be seen during this process - it had given up and taken its ball and its cheery "New Hardware Detected!" and gone home.
Four hours later, I had a working scanner again, exciting new shiny 3-D graphics for the software, and the same clunky and awkward performance for actually scanning.
The soul-destroying part is that this is entirely normal. We have three of these machines in the CW office, and this software and I are enemies of old - I have installed various versions on various computers, and it always craps itself. One time I had to reinstall Windows to fix its mess. (are we detecting a pattern here...?) Congratulations, HP - you're a worthy winner!
Post Script:
It should be possible just to install the drivers and use the scanner with some other program, such as Paintshop Pro*, or even persuade Windows* to handle it, but this is not an option with the CW gang, who Need 3-D Pictures, dammit!!
* a scanner is recognised as a TWAIN device. P informs me that TWAIN stands for "Thing Without An Interesting Name". I cannot vouch for the reliability of this information.
In third place is the ever-popular Windows XP-version software for the Belkin USB Wifi Adapter. Or, to be more exact, the installer for the Belkin USB Wifi Adapter. This installer is a splendid thing to behold - spiffy Flash animation and funky graphics and and an instruction manual and everything. Unfortunately, it consistently hangs and freezes approximately three seconds after clicking the beautifully-rendered "Install" button. Note to developers: Entertain the idea, just for a second, that all the time you spent creating those lovely animated graphics might have been better deployed writing something that actually managed to install the wretched thing.
In second place is the hire-management software we use at Container World, which, by and large, does its job verging on the adequately. However the one time I tried to update it to a newer version, it crashed so hard that it not only took out the entire program and its database, but also killed Windows stone dead, requiring the company we lease the software from to fly a member of staff up from Englandshire to reinstall Windows, reinstall the software and restore the entire database from backup. Quality stuff! Imagine if the fine people at Firefox had to do that every time someone updated!
But for sheer consistency of uselessness, the winner is the software for the HP Scanjet 5590 scanner. This week, Other-A has been on holiday, and I have been using her computer. Other-A fears computers deeply - as do the rest of the CW gang - and as a result, her Toshiba laptop remains in exactly the same condition it was when I first set it up for her about 2 years ago, ie, everything is 2 years out of date. So I set about updating it. I updated the anti-virus, which had expired about a year ago, and then I accepted Windows irritating nag suggestion to update to Internet Explorer 8 - because, despite the fact that I have installed Firefox on all the CW computers, the CW gang fail to use it because it scares them - and then I tried to scan something, using the two-years-out-of-date HP Scanjet software, and it refused to work.
Which didn't surprise me in the slightest.
Because a couple of years ago, the same thing had happened with Internet Explorer 7. HP eventually fixed that particular bug some months later, but it didn't take long for me to join the dots between IE8 and my now non-functioning HP scanner software.
Fortunately I had a somewhat newer version of the software, downloaded from HP's website, which I kept for situations like this, and which had worked on some other computers. I'd kept it because it was 200MB, and you don't want to be downloading 200MB files on a regular basis if you can help it, so I installed it, and all the peripheral shit that comes bundled with it which you have absolutely no need for duly appeared, but for some reason the actual main scanner software was MIA.
*Sigh*
Off to HP's website, to get the very newest version, which at least wasn't 200MB. It was 300MB.
That sound you're hearing, HP - that long, throaty scream followed abruptly by a wet, squishy thud? That is your customers on dial-up throwing themselves off the nearest tall building.
Anyway, one 300MB download later - which only took an hour and a half because we have a reasonable-ish broadband connection - and I had the very newest version, which installed without problem, and got on very nicely with IE8 and didn't sulk or hide. The only problem was that it couldn't detect the scanner.
*Sigh*
Its helpful suggestion was that I re-ran the installer, so I did. The 300MB monster unpacked itself again, which in itself took about 5 minutes, and opened in a flurry of animated Flash graphics which would have made the Belkin developers green with envy, and announced that I now had the option to uninstall! Which I did, during which process it became apparent that in order to make things work as they should, I had to unplug the scanner from the computer, uninstall, reinstall and then plug the scanner in, at which point the software would graciously acknowledge its existence. Windows was nowhere to be seen during this process - it had given up and taken its ball and its cheery "New Hardware Detected!" and gone home.
Four hours later, I had a working scanner again, exciting new shiny 3-D graphics for the software, and the same clunky and awkward performance for actually scanning.
The soul-destroying part is that this is entirely normal. We have three of these machines in the CW office, and this software and I are enemies of old - I have installed various versions on various computers, and it always craps itself. One time I had to reinstall Windows to fix its mess. (are we detecting a pattern here...?) Congratulations, HP - you're a worthy winner!
Post Script:
It should be possible just to install the drivers and use the scanner with some other program, such as Paintshop Pro*, or even persuade Windows* to handle it, but this is not an option with the CW gang, who Need 3-D Pictures, dammit!!
* a scanner is recognised as a TWAIN device. P informs me that TWAIN stands for "Thing Without An Interesting Name". I cannot vouch for the reliability of this information.