Saturday, May 28, 2011

Your download link has expired …

There is a practice that has taken hold among the smaller software outfits (I prefer the impolite term “chicken-shit” outfits, mostly because of their behavior) whereby you must permanently save a copy of your downloaded software if you ever plan to rebuild your computer in the future.

I have just gone through a rebuild and am reinstalling all my applications. Adobe is giving me fits because I forgot to “deinstall” Photoshop CS5 and now they will not allow me to activate it. So I am going to have to phone them and scream at them to make sure I retain rights to my own software. Microsoft’s activation (remember, they invented this curse upon the consumer in Windows XP) is much smarter, rarely giving you fits and even when they do, there is a simple “by phone” activation method that usually does the trick (it did for my Windows 7 64 license, and I changed almost every single part in my computer.)

So back to my irritation …

I got to the point of reinstalling Lightning PDF Professional, a somewhat useful and inexpensive application for creating … you guessed it … PDF files. It works with older versions of Word (newer ones can go direct to PDF) and it allows you to scan pages in to create a complete PDF document. Very handy when you want to store documents.

Anyway, here is my order summary, which they have retained …

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Grrrr … they can retain the records of my purchase so they know for a fact that I am licensed to run this product. They surely have an archive of that version of the file on their servers. But they still choose to play this chicken-shit game by trying to wring another copy out of me.

To which I say, go f-ck yourself Avanquest.

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I was just being lazy … of course I had saved a copy. But I will certainly remember this the next time you send me yet another advertisement for a cheap imitation of the real thing …

Update:

Oh ……

My …….

God …..

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What a chicken-shit outfit …

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