Just Shoot Me, pt. 33054

Sometimes, I swear to god. Yesterday, I’m merrily working away on Dr. Device presets, and I hear a small “thunk” sound and my computer freezes up. I think to myself “whee, this is gonna be fun,” and reboot. Long story short, it turns out my brand new C: drive, a 320GB Western Digital with a build date of 26-Oct-2006, has mechanically failed. Go, Western Digital!

No big deal, it happens. I keep all my data on my RAID drives, so it’s really just the OS and a couple apps that shouldn’t share drives with audio. I figure I’ll go get a new drive on Monday, re-install Vista and Cubase, and there you go…

In the mean-time, I figured I’d just run off my XP drive. Booted in to XP, that old warhorse, and everything is fine, except I never installed Cubase 4 on that drive, so I decide to do that. My first sign of trouble came when the Syncrosoft installer crashed during installation. “Okay, I’ll go get the latest version from the Syncrosoft site. No problem.” It installed, but crashes when it starts. Cubase, of course, doesn’t operate at all without the Syncrosoft license manager running. Never mind that, but the 4.0.2 updater and the 4.0.3 hotfix won’t run at all on my machine.

This is, of course, a sign that something is ill Under The Hood. It’s just incredibly frustrating. Just for fun, I ran a couple other MSI installers, which worked fine. Other dongle programs I have (Hello, Logic 5!) also work fine. It’s just some Syncrosoft stupidity that I can’t figure out. But I’m trying to imagine a scenario where this would be fun for someone that didn’t know as much about computers as I do.

In any case, rant over. My Shit List for the day is as follows, in order:

1. Western Digital. WTF, cocksuckers?

2. Syncrosoft. We haaaaates them, Precious.

3. Steinberg. Come on, guys. Do you really think that Syncrosoft stops any pirating whatsoever? It’s like punishing people that actually pay for your software for the actions of those that don’t.