Yey! It's the weekend, and I'm bored.
For those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of doing installs for various kinds of hardware and software, which ones stand out to you as the most idiotic, pointlessly complicated, glitched-up-to-all-hell, etc etc etc? Feel free to post even if you have not been stuck with the role of "the one who knows how them thar winders thingy work", and have simply faced frustration with one of these wonderfully "simple" things that are supposed to make our lives sooooo easy...
The one that stands out for me was of the glitchy variety.
When I used to work for an accounting firm, doing training/installs/support for "rapid tomes" and "fuzzy pink arbor" software (the latter has since had its name changed to something other than parsley, rosemary, or thyme), we had issues with one specific year's release of "RapidTomes". I wanna say it was the 2006 edition.
Ya see, in order for certain of its functions to work properly, it relied upon Flash (mainly for tutorials); most or all of these functions were optional. As such, the people who designed the default Installer wisely chose to have it check for the presence of the proper version of Flash before proceeding with the install. They also used what I believe was a Flash-based frontend for said installer, just for good measure (there was a pure Windows API-type installer buried on the CD's as well, but it was harder to use for laymen).
Now, when you have such a thing, you normally have it check for "Version X.XX of Flash or later"....right? Not in this case! This particular installer set checked for one very specific version of Flash, and would accept nothing older, and nothing newer. AT ALL. This meant that, if the comp had a later version of Flash on there, we had to temporarily downgrade it to that specific Flash version (I carried it with me for all installs), do the install, then update Flash, as the program itself didn't actually give a damn about it, only the installer was FUBAR. Aternatively, as we learned later on down the line, we could also use the WAPI installer, as it was designed to kick in AFTER the compatibility checks had already been done, so we saved it for a last resort.
For those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of doing installs for various kinds of hardware and software, which ones stand out to you as the most idiotic, pointlessly complicated, glitched-up-to-all-hell, etc etc etc? Feel free to post even if you have not been stuck with the role of "the one who knows how them thar winders thingy work", and have simply faced frustration with one of these wonderfully "simple" things that are supposed to make our lives sooooo easy...
The one that stands out for me was of the glitchy variety.
When I used to work for an accounting firm, doing training/installs/support for "rapid tomes" and "fuzzy pink arbor" software (the latter has since had its name changed to something other than parsley, rosemary, or thyme), we had issues with one specific year's release of "RapidTomes". I wanna say it was the 2006 edition.
Ya see, in order for certain of its functions to work properly, it relied upon Flash (mainly for tutorials); most or all of these functions were optional. As such, the people who designed the default Installer wisely chose to have it check for the presence of the proper version of Flash before proceeding with the install. They also used what I believe was a Flash-based frontend for said installer, just for good measure (there was a pure Windows API-type installer buried on the CD's as well, but it was harder to use for laymen).
Now, when you have such a thing, you normally have it check for "Version X.XX of Flash or later"....right? Not in this case! This particular installer set checked for one very specific version of Flash, and would accept nothing older, and nothing newer. AT ALL. This meant that, if the comp had a later version of Flash on there, we had to temporarily downgrade it to that specific Flash version (I carried it with me for all installs), do the install, then update Flash, as the program itself didn't actually give a damn about it, only the installer was FUBAR. Aternatively, as we learned later on down the line, we could also use the WAPI installer, as it was designed to kick in AFTER the compatibility checks had already been done, so we saved it for a last resort.
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