Roxio, EasyCD and Windows XP - the true story

Thanks Hercules for the heads up here, the article below was taken from the Register who looked further into the problem surrounding Roxio, WindowsXP and their amazing support to customers (NOT!)

Roxio has come under sustained fire from users (and indeed The Register) for its failure to get apparently simple things like writing CD burning software for Win2k right first time, and for possible rapacity when it comes to getting people to cough up for the latest version of the software when actually, it might be a pretty trivial exercise to get the old version of the software to work with Microsoft"s latest and greatest. Plus, the Adaptec spin-off has a major mindshare problem with the cognoscenti of the CD burning world, who reckon EasyCD is pants, and you should really be using Nero.

As we pointed out last week, Roxio is currently in the curious position of insisting that EasyCD Creator 4.x is not compatible with WinXP, and that you should therefore cough for 5, whilst Microsoft"s latest compatibility update for XP claims that 4.x is now compatible with XP. One thinks unflattering thoughts, including expressions like "bloated fat cat" and "profiteer" when confronted with those two contradictory claims. Our source knows nothing about the marketing end of the deal, but he does know about how tricky it was to put the software for XP together, how this process made 4.x and 5 code more or less equivalent, and - as an added bonus - how big a bummer it is to be tracking a moving target like Microsoft:

"At the 5.0 revision of Roxio"s code," he says, "some fairly major changes happened to the kernel code and to the user-level code that talked to it. Call it what you will, some of these changes were necessary to make the code stable under Win 2000, let alone support the Win XP abomination. These changes were fairly wide-spread, even into what should have been the relatively unaffected GUI binaries."

News source: The Reg

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