Not having to do with other customers, just a rant about a company that hasn't been the same since Peter Norton left.
Because of the short-sightedness of whoever originally set up the partitions on this machine, way back when, our c: partition is chronically short of space, resulting in a recent failure of our drug database to update itself. So I was poking around add/remove programs, looking for unnecessary stuff that I could ditch.
I discover that Symantec pcAnywhere is installed.
Damn, is that still around? I remember using it in college, back around 1995 or so. I called our software vendor just to make sure that we aren't using it for anything. They say it's not needed, and I can ditch it. In any case, it claims not to have been used since 2004, which is four years before we even acquired this computer.
So I go to uninstall it. Uninstall fails. Why? Because these morons at Symantec saw fit to leave the uninstall file in a subdirectory under %TEMP%. Which gets cleaned out every now and then (see above re: shortage of disk space).
Fine, I can nuke it manually, right? Hit symantec's website, find the instructions.
Holy crap. They want me to manually remove no fewer than 151 freaking registry keys. About a quarter of which are CLSIDs, which are identiified by hex numbers only. No, they didn't give me a convenient .reg file to import either. Had to go through the list by hand nuking them one by one. (Can't even shift-click to get a bunch at once, regedit won't let you for some reason.)
There were quite a few things I'd rather have been spending time on than that, but I got it done. Sheesh. Temp directories are not supposed to be places to store stuff long-term, you idiots.
Ah well. The mantra of Another Place that I used to hang out in was "All Software Sucks". Still, some suck harder than others.
Because of the short-sightedness of whoever originally set up the partitions on this machine, way back when, our c: partition is chronically short of space, resulting in a recent failure of our drug database to update itself. So I was poking around add/remove programs, looking for unnecessary stuff that I could ditch.
I discover that Symantec pcAnywhere is installed.
Damn, is that still around? I remember using it in college, back around 1995 or so. I called our software vendor just to make sure that we aren't using it for anything. They say it's not needed, and I can ditch it. In any case, it claims not to have been used since 2004, which is four years before we even acquired this computer.
So I go to uninstall it. Uninstall fails. Why? Because these morons at Symantec saw fit to leave the uninstall file in a subdirectory under %TEMP%. Which gets cleaned out every now and then (see above re: shortage of disk space).
Fine, I can nuke it manually, right? Hit symantec's website, find the instructions.
Holy crap. They want me to manually remove no fewer than 151 freaking registry keys. About a quarter of which are CLSIDs, which are identiified by hex numbers only. No, they didn't give me a convenient .reg file to import either. Had to go through the list by hand nuking them one by one. (Can't even shift-click to get a bunch at once, regedit won't let you for some reason.)
There were quite a few things I'd rather have been spending time on than that, but I got it done. Sheesh. Temp directories are not supposed to be places to store stuff long-term, you idiots.
Ah well. The mantra of Another Place that I used to hang out in was "All Software Sucks". Still, some suck harder than others.
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