Sunday, September 17, 2006

Random and Easy

Malo is 2 today. Farewell babyhood! Hello terrordom!

We thought it time to get a video camera, after months or thinking about it. We bought a cute little Canon dvd camcorder thing. Warning. Don't buy a frickin Canon dvd camcorder, no matter how cute and how reasonably priced. After downloading the software it came with, and puzzling over its lack of workingness, we discovered in the manual that it won't work until registered online. However this presented a problem as we didn't have the cd key. Then on another piece of yellow paper in the box we discovered that we actually needed to download an update off the website - so we did that. The 622mb download took a while, but we figured it was worth it, or we'd never be able to play anything we recorded (turns out Canon doesn't work with any other software than its own). Long story long. Didn't work. Nor did the dvds play in our dvd player as it promised in the box

So the camcorder is wending its merry way back to the store as I write, and as I uninstall the 1.5gb of software installed so far. Fingers crossed Sony will do better.

The box said random and easy. It was certainly random. Bastards.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Woah. Forced registration online is commonplace now (unfortunately) but the huge update download required - and which doesn't work - is pretty poor.

Did you contact Canon over this? They should either update their packs or offer to send you CD with the new software, IMO.

Anonymous said...

Gosh. I know three other people whose birthday it is today. Plus one anniversary. And throw in a christening this morning for good measure. What an incredibly greedy day.

Hope Malo had a great birthday and that you're not too exhausted.

Martha Craig said...

To be honest, we just thought it was too crap to bother with. We've replaced it with a Sony.

I wouldn't make forced registration if they actually gave you the key number!

And we wanted it today for our son's birthday. Plus after we had problems I looked up some more reviews which confirmed we weren't the only people having trouble with the software. We spent HOURS trying to get it to work, and were just glad to see the back of it.

Shame, because it was cute and had a cool remote.

llew said...

My birthday that day too :)

A bit older than Malo though.

Anonymous said...

Juha, they just bought the freaking physical device. Why the hell register online?

It's not as if this is Windows.

As for Sony, be careful, they have a nasty habit of installing spyware on your doze machines.