The Perils of New Software

     by Wick Smith
     Tokyo PC Users Group

     I think it may be a sign of certain middle age that the thought of 
     opening a new software package no longer fills me with wild 
     anticipation. I remember, as perhaps you can, when ripping open that 
     shrink wrap was a primal act of exploration. Today it seems every 
     software package was produced by Pandora.
	
     Take Aldus Persuasion. Please. Just kidding folks  ...  lovely 
     package, lovely package.  What I'm talking about is the way new 
     software seems to screw up everything else on your system. Have you 
     seen an installation package lately that doesn't want to "modify" 
     your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS? I don't know about you, but my 
     AUTOEXEC.BAT is now only slightly shorter than War and Peace and 
     some of the passages even sound similar.  In fact, my AUTOEXEC.BAT 
     is like one of those hundred-year-old stews where you keep adding and 
     stirring new ingredients but you never ever start fresh. I have l
     ines in my AUTOEXEC.BAT that have been handed down from generation 
     to generation in our family. And I have watched in horror as 
     installation routines have barged their way into my heirloom and 
     trampled on it with their muddy feet.

	But that's just the beginning. How do you feel about the trend 
     towards compressed distribution disks? You know, the ones where all 
     ten of the disks that come in the package have been compressed with 
     PKZip or Lharc. If everything goes just wonderfully, you're OK. But 
     when you later decide you need one file that you either erased or 
     doesn't work, you're really out of luck. The directory of the disk 
     tells you nothing, and unless you're lucky you have no way to get at 
     a single file unless you install the whole program over again, often 
     destroying any customization you've done in the meantime. Windows is 
     like that. It's not much fun trying to get a single driver or file 
     off one of those disks. First of all, their Expand program is 
     proprietary and secondly they don't tell you where the files are. In 
     fact, they don't tell you what any of the files really do.

	One thing they certainly do is take up hard disk space. Persuasion, 
     which is my latest distraction, takes up around 7MB of space before 
     you actually do any work. Powerpoint is around 6MB and even lowly 
     Harvard Graphics is up around 5MB. And once the files are installed 
     it's next to impossible to determine which ones you need and which 
     you don't. People of habit, like myself, probably don't need half of 
     the files that get copied to the hard disk, but who wants to risk 
     erasing the one file that may be vital?

	And speaking of erasing, new software has this diabolical resistance 
     to being removed from your system. It's like old chewing gum stuck to 
     the bottom of a cinema chair. Even if you remove every file from the 
     directories that it has set up for itself you're still not through 
     with it. It may have set up hidden and read-only files in your root 
     directory, changed your path, insinuated itself into your CONFIG.SYS, 
     and written references to itself in numerous configuration and .INI 
     files. Long after you thought you'd rid yourself completely of 
     Whoopie Graphics 2000, it will come back to haunt you.

	But let's concede for a moment that you do get the software 
     installed, that you do have the hard disk acreage to devote to it, 
     and that you actually need to do what it's supposed to do. Now comes 
     the fun of learning it. Software today comes in a ten-pound box 
     filled with dense reading material. At minimum there is a pocket 
     command guide, a desktop reference guide, a user's manual, something 
     called "getting started," an installation guide, a tutorial, a 
     technical reference guide, a thin booklet called "read this first," 
     and sometimes even a video tape. CorelDraw! even throws in a key 
     chain.
	
     Ominously, there are often ten or twenty odd advertising pamphlets 
     and brochures included, each trying to sell you a book, cassette or 
     VHS tape for learning the program faster. Not a real confidence 
     booster.  The net effect of this is to make the experience of 
     opening the package and getting started more like a religious ritual 
     than a simple operation. There are cards to fill out, invitations to 
     decline, license agreements to read, envelopes to open, reply cards 
     to be pondered. Perhaps some people are impressed with this trove of 
     goodies.  I used to be. I used to be one of those people who 
     actually liked software manuals. I'd keep them by the toilet where 
     I could peruse them at leisure, away from the distraction of screen 
     and keyboard. I'd sit rapturously through passages like "To return 
     to the main menu, press Alt-Shft-Ctrl-M, unless you are editing a 
     table, in which case press Esc to bring up the transfer submenu and 
     choose "ain", after saving your work by pressing Ctrl-F6." But now 
     I'm not sure which of the eight enclosed guides is the "real" one.