Since I am a developer, I don’t usually go out of my way to make disparaging remarks about other software companies. Oh, we programmers ARE an opinionated bunch, but we ALL have been humbled by the complexity of the environment we work in and the difficulty of accommodating the non-standard “standards” that apply. But our basic mantra is: “Do no harm”.
I have encountered the egregious breach of that mantra just today. Read on and have caution!
About a month ago a purchased a new laptop, as my Gateway was LONG in the tooth and was lumbering under the bloat of the latest development tools and frameworks. It is an Acer Travelmate 8572. With an Intel i7 64 bit processor (Quad Core!) I expected some great gains in speed and productivity. Alas, I am not completely happy with it, even at 64 bits it won’t support more than 4GB RAM and the graphics resolution isn’t as high as I want (but that is all another story).
I had installed Windows 7 Ultimate and have had very good luck with it. Some incompatibilities and hassles, but overall, a good experience. However, in the last few days my bluetooth headset has been acting flaky so I decided to install some updated bluetooth drivers. No joy, I still had intermittent loss of connection. So I decided to remove the device drivers, reboot and then reinstall.
Removing the drivers, no problem. I rebooted and then attempted to reinstall the software. It couldn’t find the hardware. DOH! Function-F3 activated the hardware and the software started to install, but first it began by uninstalling the software. Progress bar got to about 75% and then just sat, and sat, and sat. I saw plenty of hard drive activity but no progress. So I decided to check email while I was waiting. The shortcut said it couldn’t find the thunderbird.exe file that was referenced. That’s weird! I followed the link to the folder for Mozilla Thunderbird. Not there! NO FOLDER!!!! Then my icons started to disappear off of my desktop. So, I immediately shut down the system. I restarted and now the entire desktop was gone and I was down to just some basic folders and programs on the start menu. Basically nothing left in the Program Files folder. The system was hammered. After pondering what I should do and thinking I had picked up some nasty malware I started a System Restore. It ran for about 45 minutes. While I was running the restore, I decided to Google WIDCOMM and uninstall and delete and I found this:
Basically the WIDCOMM uninstall will go rogue and delete the data on the C drive. This is confirmed by Microsoft (signed driver!) and so MS is an accessory to hard drive murder IMHO. The negligence of WIDCOMM in producing such a flawed POS (piece of software) is unconscionable. These folks apparently are clueless software developers and, no doubt, the software was probably developed off shore by low cost programmers in order to maximize their profits.
The System Restore did very little to get things functioning again. So, now I will have to reformat and reinstall EVERYTHING!! Thanks Widcomm!
Anyone game for a Class Action Suit against Widcomm? I’ll lose at least a day of productivity. That is worth a few bucks to me….