The author is the owner and operator of the longline/bandit grouper boat Margaritas
eMail sent to P-Sea Software
I recently bought a full copy of your software from a friend. He had purchased it from a dealer in Tampa, installed it on a laptop intending to use it on his boat, and after a month of not being able to get a GPS to work with the software and other problems that made the software worthless to him, he gave his wife the laptop, put the software bundle (CDs, cables, USB key, manual, assorted other things) in an envelope and stuck it in a drawer and went out and bought a SiTex plotter which he is happily using.
Being as how he is less than a novice computer user, I assumed he was just unfamiliar with a Windows interface or even any sort of computer interface so, since I already had a computer on my boat being used only as a way to keep logs and entertain the crew (video games and movies) I figured why not? and offered to pay him what he had in the software package and install it on my boat computer.
Understand, I am not a novice user. I have worked for a large Marine dealership where one of my duties was to maintain the computers and the network. I have my own web design business and have designed and built a number of commercial and e-commerce websites. I've extensively modified my own computers. I've done lots of troubleshooting and worked with many programs, both large commercial software and small freeware.
I brought the boat's computer home, verified everything on it was working properly, added a few new movie files and a couple of other inconsequential things and then installed your software.
Biggest mistake I've ever made.
The computer has two physical hard drives, one in a single partition configuration and one divided into four logical partitions. It is a dual boot set-up with Win98SE on one partition, Win2K Pro on another and programs and data storage on the other two.
Despite being loaded while Win2K was running, your software didn't recognize which partition was the Win2K boot/OS partition and put its operating files on the Win98 partition. No big deal, just a bit sloppy.
Your software then proceeded to scatter bits and pieces of itself and data files round and about three separate partitions. Again, not really a big deal, just very sloppy.
Once I got it running and played around with it for, oh, two minutes, I came to the conclusion that it was one of the worst written and clumsiest programs I'd ever used in many years of computing.
After using it for two or three hours, I came to the further conclusion that my initial conclusion was incorrect and I had been giving your program far too much credit. It was worse than I could ever believe.
After checking your website and noting the numerous misspellings and clumsy mistakes just on the first page of your site, I realized that your code is probably as messy as your website and couldn't possibly be doing good things to my machine.
I decided to remove the thing from my computer before I just got frustrated by the sloppy code, ugly GUI, incompatibility with something as simple as a mouse scroll, crude attempts at work-arounds, cludgy methods of retrieving and displaying data, and everything else your program has to offer. I went to the Windows Control panel and discovered that your program had not even put an entry in there from which to remove the program. After looking around a little bit, I found the program folder and was a bit surprised to see an "uninstall.exe" in there. I clicked it and it proceeded to do whatever whoever wrote it coded it to do without giving me any options about what was about to happen to my equipment.
Once it was gone, I took a break and then decided to finish up installing a few TV show episodes on one drive and take it back to the boat. I discovered that the player (Zoom Player) I use to run .avi files was no longer working. I further discovered that there were suddenly no traces of ffdshow on my computer. Now, your program has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with a video/audio codec utility but for some reason uninstalling your program removed ffdshow from the computer. I reinstalled ffdshow on the machine and ZoomPlayer began working normally again.
I told my wife about this and said "I wonder what else that thing screwed up?".
Well, this morning I shut the computer off for the first time since uninstalling your program. I took the computer back to the boat and installed it back on board. I hit the "ON" button and, lo and behold, except for the drives all spinning up and two indicator lights on the front of the machine blinking at me, absolutely nothing happened. No BIOS check, no error messages, no beep code, nothing. The monitor is working (and displays a "no video source" message when I turn the computer off) and the power supply is working, the fans and the hard drives are spinning up.
I checked with the person I bought the program from and he said he hadn't tried (or bothered) to uninstall it from the laptop his wife is now using, without the USB key he just assumed that the program was "gone".
I'm hoping that I will be able to somehow get my computer working again. I'm also reasonably sure that I won't be keeping quiet about this and will, in fact, let everyone who wants to listen to me know exactly what I think of your program and exactly what my experiences with WindPlot from P-Sea Soft have been.
I'll be looking forward to reading my letter on your website, it will certainly be on mine.
Michael Athorn