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morningreis
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2005
- Messages
- 1,574
What is it with companies releasing remarkably poor software to accompany their hardware? If you are going to sell some product, you'd better stand by your hardware.
When my birthday rolled around, I recieved an mrobe mp3 player made by Olympus. It's a nice mp3 player... No buttons, all touch screen, has a camera on the back with a light, small enough... I did some research on it and it's using some good quality parts. Seagate 20 GB HD, I'm told a good ARM processor. Very similar spec wise to an iPod. You'd expect this thing to be really good right? It plays music alright, but the firmware on this thing is horrendously buggy. There are often long pauses when the damn thing chokes up. The interface isn't great, slow to react... Ugh... Olympus lost some cool points for that. Next there is the program they provide to sync all your music onto the thing. It's called mtrip, and it's even more buggy than the firmware on the device itself. Some versions don't work at all. It has all sorts of problems and is very slow/unstable. On top of that, Olympus seem to be satisfied with all the work they have put into the firmware and mtrip, so they have decided to no longer put out any new versions of them, essentially leaving behind their customers with an otherwise good piece of hardware that has turned shitty because of lack of support and lack of quality in the software side of things.
Now tonight, I'm trying to get some important police department recordings off an Olympus voice recorder. I hook the thing up to the USB port on my PC and it can't recognise the device/install the driver. It searches of a driver, and then my PC becomes totally unusable until I reboot. I try using the only driver available on the CD, and it does the same thing. I go to the Olympus website to find new drivers for the thing, and there is nothing. I don't mean there are no new drivers, I mean that there are absolutely 0 drivers on the webpage. What? Olympus never released driver/software updates for this voice recorder? Now I'm just left wondering how else I can get these files off the recorder.
A while ago, I got a Linksys wireless router so I could use wireless internet on my laptops. Soon after, I buy a wireless card for my PC so I can get rid of the cable running down my hallway. I find a Netgear wireless G adapter and hook it up. Wow this one was a nightmare. The software that came with it froze my PC every tme I ran it. No biggie, I got the updated version from the Netgear website. The drivers had already installed and such, and they read as fine according to windows, but the damn thing refused to connect. I go to their support forums, and I see the whole forum filled with complaints that the thing doesn't connect. I make a post there in vain. Not surprisingly the only people who replied were othr disgruntled customers who had the same problem as me. I call tech support, get routed through to india to some people who really offer no help. I follow all the troubleshooting steps they tell me, even though I've done them all before about 15 times. I just play dumb and play along to show the guy that there is genuinely something wrong with the software. He tells me a level two technician will call me back to help. Nobody ever called. Wasn't expecting anyone to to be honest. The adapter did work sometimes, but was slow with massive packetloss, and I couldn't hold a connection more than 20 minutes. Almost 100% sure it was a driver problem, and I told this to the customer support guy only to be told flat out, "no, no, you are wrong."
The point of my rant is here is that companies who can't be prepared to get their shit straight, stand by their products and provide quality software really should not stay in business. Netgear lost my business a long time ago, and Olympus just lost any future business today with this voice recorder problem. IMO there should be some testing/quality standards decided by some other authority that these companies should adhere to, because this really isn't fair to the customer.
/rant
Discuss and share your own stories.
Sorry if there are any typos, I'm kinda tired atm. Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.
When my birthday rolled around, I recieved an mrobe mp3 player made by Olympus. It's a nice mp3 player... No buttons, all touch screen, has a camera on the back with a light, small enough... I did some research on it and it's using some good quality parts. Seagate 20 GB HD, I'm told a good ARM processor. Very similar spec wise to an iPod. You'd expect this thing to be really good right? It plays music alright, but the firmware on this thing is horrendously buggy. There are often long pauses when the damn thing chokes up. The interface isn't great, slow to react... Ugh... Olympus lost some cool points for that. Next there is the program they provide to sync all your music onto the thing. It's called mtrip, and it's even more buggy than the firmware on the device itself. Some versions don't work at all. It has all sorts of problems and is very slow/unstable. On top of that, Olympus seem to be satisfied with all the work they have put into the firmware and mtrip, so they have decided to no longer put out any new versions of them, essentially leaving behind their customers with an otherwise good piece of hardware that has turned shitty because of lack of support and lack of quality in the software side of things.
Now tonight, I'm trying to get some important police department recordings off an Olympus voice recorder. I hook the thing up to the USB port on my PC and it can't recognise the device/install the driver. It searches of a driver, and then my PC becomes totally unusable until I reboot. I try using the only driver available on the CD, and it does the same thing. I go to the Olympus website to find new drivers for the thing, and there is nothing. I don't mean there are no new drivers, I mean that there are absolutely 0 drivers on the webpage. What? Olympus never released driver/software updates for this voice recorder? Now I'm just left wondering how else I can get these files off the recorder.
A while ago, I got a Linksys wireless router so I could use wireless internet on my laptops. Soon after, I buy a wireless card for my PC so I can get rid of the cable running down my hallway. I find a Netgear wireless G adapter and hook it up. Wow this one was a nightmare. The software that came with it froze my PC every tme I ran it. No biggie, I got the updated version from the Netgear website. The drivers had already installed and such, and they read as fine according to windows, but the damn thing refused to connect. I go to their support forums, and I see the whole forum filled with complaints that the thing doesn't connect. I make a post there in vain. Not surprisingly the only people who replied were othr disgruntled customers who had the same problem as me. I call tech support, get routed through to india to some people who really offer no help. I follow all the troubleshooting steps they tell me, even though I've done them all before about 15 times. I just play dumb and play along to show the guy that there is genuinely something wrong with the software. He tells me a level two technician will call me back to help. Nobody ever called. Wasn't expecting anyone to to be honest. The adapter did work sometimes, but was slow with massive packetloss, and I couldn't hold a connection more than 20 minutes. Almost 100% sure it was a driver problem, and I told this to the customer support guy only to be told flat out, "no, no, you are wrong."
The point of my rant is here is that companies who can't be prepared to get their shit straight, stand by their products and provide quality software really should not stay in business. Netgear lost my business a long time ago, and Olympus just lost any future business today with this voice recorder problem. IMO there should be some testing/quality standards decided by some other authority that these companies should adhere to, because this really isn't fair to the customer.
/rant
Discuss and share your own stories.
Sorry if there are any typos, I'm kinda tired atm. Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.