Remember dongles? They’re devices that often came with (usually expensive) software. You plugged them into a port on your computer, and the software wouldn’t run without them. It was a stone age anti-piracy device, basically.
Well, lookee what arrived this morning:
That’s right. It’s a dongle! A USB dongle, in fact. Ah, the memories. The hideous memories. Memories of software not recognising you have a dongle plugged in and calling you a pirate. Memories of losing the dongle and being unable to run the software you’ve paid far too much money for. What fun.
So this dongle comes as part of a bit of embroidery design software called DigitiserPro. Sorry DigitizerPro, with a zed. It’s made by a company called Janome, who also make the USB-enabled sewing machine (yes, such a thing exists) it came with.
Now, here’s a problem. We have permission to install this software on all our PCs in the textiles room. Sadly, the dongle says no, since we have but one dongle. I have to ask, however, why does it have a dongle? The only use for the software is to use it with the sewing machine, or to design things on another computer, which are then transferred to the computer the sewing machine. So the sewing machine itself is acting as the copy protection, surely?
And there’s more! The software is awful. And I haven’t even managed to use it yet! The installer froze my machine. Once installed, it rebooted my PC (which is a Big Ol’ Pile Of Badness), and then took an age to load once that was done.
Now I don’t have a particularly slow machine. I’ve got an Athlon64 3200+, with a gig of RAM. Way in excess of the 800MHz PIII/128MB combo recommended. And yes, it does warn you on the splash screen (above) that it may take a while… but ten minutes? It wasn’t a one-off either – I know some programs take a bit longer on first run, but this was the same the second and third time.
And then there was more good news! I minimised the program, and my computer froze. Even to the point where the mouse wouldn’t move, and keypresses made the PC speaker beep. After a few minutes, I regained very, very slow control of Windows, and the Task Manager eventually opened to show DigitizerPro taking up 700-odd MB of my precious, precious RAM and a solid 99% of the CPU cycles.
I’m overjoyed to be in possession of this program. No, I really am.
found this while looking for sew machine problems and cures. Sat here grinning madly because at least one other soul thinks Wilcom/Janome software is a memory guzzling cpu strangling bit of software. I have 3 gig of RAM and it slows my machine to a geriatric painful shuffle. For what, an over priced, very basic embroidery digitising package, that because it’s a specialised area, they can over charge and under deliver for. Wait till it develops a few of it’s wonderful glitches. Wilcom au, the actual program writers, and Janome global will vehemently deny their software is flawed. No it has to be user ignorance, I wish your textile room users good luck. It’s not a terrible bit of kit once you get passed the screen flash, it’s an esily learned very very basic digitising program, perfect for those who are new to the whole concept of computerised embroidery machines. As for the dongle, well you scratch any embroidery dogitising software and you’ll find a dongle lurking around somewhere.