Monday, February 13, 2006

DriverGuide.com

Another one in my series on screwing their users to make more cash.

I signed up on DriverGuide.com a long time ago. I could search for drivers and download drivers fairly quickly. I logged in today and found that I needed to complete some "special" offers before they could validate my log in. Once I did complete one these offer, which entailed giving my personal information to companies I really don't want to hear from, they continued to give me the message that I had not completed the activation of my account, which I did years ago as I recall. Finally I noticed that I might be able to get rid of that message by logging out and then back in. At this point I started getting messages about their servers being too busy to let me in. After an hour of this I find that what they were pointing me to was a firmware upgrade for my Pioneer DVR-A07. What I wanted was a driver, since I can't get the thing to install on WIN2K without a driver, thus I can't even apply a firmware update without the OS knowing about it. This part of the problem is not DriverGuide's fault, but Pioneer and/or Microsoft. We can save that rant for later.

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