Software that WAS good, but is now upgraded to crap...

[hidflect]

When early versions are better than later versions...

They make a great piece of software, get financed and try to "expand" their customer base by turning their soft into a piece of bloated **** - successfully. Like:

Winamp - 2.9, great. Now V.3-5 - WTF, crashed again?

ACDSee - 3.0 Great! Now V.6. Kaboom! The convenience! Your .gifs automatically crash on demand

Norton's anything - V.3.0 NDD,NU,NAV Used to come on 3 floppys. Saved my @$$ 1000 times. Now - "Symantec". It's such Bullshit that if you look inside the subdirectory in the XP version of Norton TOols, they've just dumped all the old Win98-ME crap in there without even removing/updating it! Error message sez something like "Cannot run on this operating system" when you try to run some of the utilities.

Any other examples of software "Back to the future-itis"?

Oh yeah, and not forgetting the obvious - Win 95 zoomed up to WinME. ME cost me my friends it was that bad...

[Rainer]

windows me cost you your friends??!! lol! Thats pretty funny. I dont know your circumstances, but it would take a pretty damn serious piece of software to make me loose my friends over it.

But I agree with you on software that gets 'downgraded' in the upgrade process. Paint Shop Pro is my example. I'm still using psp5 and I think they're up to version 8 now just because 5 is the best and anything you can do with any later version I can do with version 5.

But the best example is the DOS 6.0 - > Windows 95 transition. Sure, windows 95 was great and innovative or whatever, but I'd still be happy to be still using good old MS-DOS.

[AGI1122]

Uh... they went to windows 1.0 before they went to windows 95.

infact windows went all the way up to about 3.1 before it even went to 95.

[hidflect]

windows me cost you your friends??!!

Yeah - it READS funny but you shoulda been there! I swaggered in as the IT saviour and upgraded a mate's system from 98SE to ME when it came out and he was a pretty heavy-hitting recording dude using Steinberg/Cubase/etc. Lost the lot. At that time I didn't know how to hack around the no-DOS system of ME... A re-install mysteriously buggered everything on C: Coulda been because of the overwrite of My Documents...

I was still musing what could have gone wrong as I ran from the room dodging a rather clunky, outdated, metal-boxed mixer aimed at my head...

PSPx vs. PSP8... I'm in complete agreement. I use V.7. I tried using v.8.0 and was totally mystified for about 20 minutes before I finally understood what I had to do... re-install the previous version! ;D

[Candy]

Just for the list:

Acrobat reader - V4 is exactly the same as V6, except for smoother scrolling, but at the cost of a something like 10x memory usage, higher processor usage, lots of trash in there and a lot of disk space it uses. Also, the download takes 6x longer.

M$ MSN Messenger- keep it compatible dudes... don't kick out the smarter half of the user base...

And for the contrary:

GCC - lot better compatibility, code is compiled better, results are more predictable (between 2.? and 3.?). All 3.x compilers I tested worked, and got better every upgrade. Everything above 2.95.3 was officially not even supported to compile the linux kernel with, because it was so buggy you could bet on it not working.

Windows NT series before XP, when comparing with 9x. They're more stable & better design (although it's decreasing).

[DennisCGc]

Oh yeah, and not forgetting the obvious - Win 95 zoomed up to WinME.

True, infact: A friend off my had Windows 98, then he upgraded it to Windows ME.
But then the computer crashed a LOT more than it already did
I thought the "upgrade" solution was to make the software better than it already was, and to make it more stable.
We also take Red Hat Linux as example.
The first distribution were quite good, but now (also called Fendora) it is said it's windows xp, it loads more unneccasary things.

[hidflect]

Uh... they went to windows 1.0 before they went to windows 95.

infact windows went all the way up to about 3.1 before it even went to 95.

I saw Windows 3.1 for download at Suprnova's bittorrent if your feeling nostalgic! Think it was about 48MB if my own memory caches properly...

[Eero Ränik]

Most of the software I've wanted to, have already been listed, so I'll list some hardware. For example, AMD CPUs, they're going more unstable every new release (just my opinion)...
hidflect:
First, it's illegal, second: my copy of Windows 3.1 closest to me at the moment is on 7 floppies, how comes it's 48 MB there?
Candy:
I have to say that Windows XP is very stable, however I think that Service Pack 2 will ruin it.

[Kon-Tiki]

Bloody Direct friggin' X >:(

[hidflect]

Bloody Direct friggin' X >:(

Really? I've noticed a lot of CODEC screwups but I put that down to the explosion (almost literally) in new encoding types. Huh. I'm continuously uninstalling one pack for the next. Mixed in with my stupidity for falling for installing unauthorized releases of NVIDIA drivers... never again!

This is where simplicity comes in. I have 2 pieces of software. VideoLAN and BS Player. They play EVERYthing. And both put together are still a 1/4 the size of WMPlayer. I never need to update my version of videoLAN... I treasure it as a throwback to old days of "robust program that can fit on a coupla floppies"

First, it's illegal

Aaargh - busted again! :-[ Will I never learn. Yeah, it must be @18MB, not 48!

[Eero Ränik]

Aaargh - busted again! :-[ Will I never learn. Yeah, it must be @18MB, not 48!

Just don't mention it here, as it can get the thread locked...

[Rainer]

Uh... they went to windows 1.0 before they went to windows 95.

infact windows went all the way up to about 3.1 before it even went to 95.

well, duh
What I meant was we were forced to use win95 because dos6 slowly became more and more redundant.

[srg]

hmm What about Microsoft Office?

srg

[Andrew_Baker]

I can't remember the URL (It was at least two years ago that I needed it for my Mac), but there is at least one site that is nothing but downloads and support for obsolete versions of different apps and utilities. The site never really got hassled, because the original publishers didn't even host downloads for a lot of these, but for guys like me that often have to work with older computers, it was a matter of necessity to grab, like version 1 or 2 of an app, because anything larger would eat up all HD and RAM. Christonnacrutch, we all remember when 128K was a HUGE amount of memory.

Funny that the developers can't...

[Candy]

hmm What about Microsoft Office?

point of discussion, office was reasonable, but is now bad. I never saw a version that did what I wanted it to so technically it wasn't good (yes, I did search for ways to do it).

The 2002 (probably XP) that I work with at my internship regularly trashes my main documents, has the ability to crash 3 times within a minute (with thanks to the P4 2200 in there, it can start 3 times a minute). It also offers the features that it automatically adjusts and adds styles, when I've completely worked out my style palette, so the document in effect is wrecked anyway. And, just to kick it, it locks documents so I have to stop working to make a backup (which isn't productive).

PS: think I'm back again, haven't had a really bad temper in a week