Whum
Topic: Technology
I put a DVD burner in Bob last night.

The amazing thing is that it went in perfectly. No hardware errors or anything. It was all jumpered, cabled, and secured exactly, the system recognized it instantly, the software installed easily. There was nothing craptacular at all.

Until I tried to use it.

The software left something to be desired.

Every time I tried to do something with it, I got the "Please insert a CD-RW" message. Which was odd, since I was trying to burn it as a DVD. All I wanted to do was test the DVD functionality, and it kept asking for the CD-RW. This got frustrating. It was supposed to cheerfully say "Okay! Burning now!" and little "whum-whum" noises were supposed to come from the drive as it did amazingly complex things with plastic, mylar, and a laser; things verging on the obscene, in a strange, technical sort of way ("Ah, mah leetle diskette... tehk mah data!" (whum-whum-whum...).

I tried burning a DVD (it was copy protected and said, essentially, "go whum yourself"), tried saving data to the DVD (which it recognized as a DVD but instead of burning onto it, asked for a CD-RW), tried burning MP3's onto it (still wants a CD-RW), and otherwise behaved in an amazingly annoying manner (didn't work). There's nothing functionally wrong with the drive. It passed all the analysis software tests, and writes properly. The software is the part which turned out to be craptacular.

I mentioned it to my resident geek, who said "Oh, using Nero's freeware that came with the drive?"
"Yes!"
"We get this a lot. There's no documentation or anything that says to do this, but on the StartSmart menu, in the upper right corner, there's a couple of icons. Default is CD. You have to click the one that says DVD."

Why? The software can detect what kind of disc is in the drive! Why the Hells don't they at least say "The disc in the drive is a DVD, and the software is currently configured for CD. Would you like to change discs or configuration?" That'd be like a line of code.

I never even noticed those icons. And there's nothing in the help files that I could find either. But I tried clicking the DVD icon. It works. And when you do that, the software is actually very convenient.

It's the documentation that's craptacular.