Think Twice Before Upgrading Your Software
Can you count how many times a piece of software has asked you to “upgrade now!”? Upgrade offers are always presented as if you’ll be behind in the world if you continue using your now ‘outdated’ software. The upgrades usually comes at a cost. “Yes, it can be yours for the low, low price of just $99.99.”
Before you fall victim to the upgrade trap, just remember the current version of software you have will always continue to work fine as it is, just as intended. Don’t fall into the upgrade trap- it’s another marketing device aimed at convincing people to spend more money on a typically insignificant change of software.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
There is risk involved in upgrading your software. In fact, an upgrade can sometimes be a downgrade.
If you ever used Adobe Photoshop, you will know indeed that some of the ‘upgrades’ are actually ‘downgrades’ in disguise. Let’s take Photoshop 7.0 for instance. One of its features is it shows thumbnail previews of .psd files right on your operating system, such as Windows XP. So, it’s convenient and expected behavior, actually, to browse your files and see what your images look like before opening them up. Enter Photoshop 8.0, which boasted huge essential and urgent features. Well, if you upgraded, you just lost your ability to view your .psd files. Yes, you would then have to open every one up one by one to see what they were. What a pain! In fact, it was such a pain, Adobe tried to release its own ‘workaround’- Adobe Bridge- to address the issue. Another example of a piece of crap software. It was clunky slow, and riddled with bugs. Having the ability of previewing .psd was so essential, I kept my older version of Photoshop on my machine. It was not worth upgrading and losing that!
Another example of poor upgrades includes piece of graphics software called Extensis PhotoTools. The Photoshop plugin used to include a great filter, called PhotoGroove. It really made incredible effects to typography. But when they ‘upgraded’ to be compatible with a newer version of Photoshop, the PhotoGroove was quietly left out. It lost the most important and useful tool in the package.
The same thing occurred with Extensis Portfolio. The entire application was coded for one of their newer versions and unfortunately, the html output was no longer clean. It had all kinds of Javascript garbage code which left it very hard to edit or validate for W3C standards. They tried hard to improve some components, but in doing so, made others worse.
Those who have used graphic design software for a length of time may remember the big Quark 3.3 upgrade to Quark 4.0. It was supposed to be a big leap, adding editable polygon boxes and additional drawing tools. What it did, however, is cause a lot of crashes. Those who paid the hefty fee for the upgrade traded a stable version of the software for one that was full of bugs and ready to crash at any time. Printers took time to even accept the new format, making it a rough transition, and an open door for another competitor program, like Adobe InDesign.
Another graphics program that has a worthless upgrade was FlexiSign Pro- a program used for plotting and cutting vinyl sign decals. When they urged for a certain upgrade (at a premium price, of course), they did not inform you that you would lose the use of many of your fonts. The new version simply was not programmed to be compatible with the other fonts like the previous version. Plus, you could expect a lot of crashes and system incompatibilities. Was it worth the upgrade? Probably not, even if it were free.
Upgrade scams extend far beyond graphics software. Common software such as antivirus programs can be plagued with problems. The two largest antivirus programs, Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan are both spammy applications that have continual popups pestering you to upgrade. There is no way to turn them off either, without disabling the program. It’s like having a used car salesman always on your screen, ready to harass you at any moment and halt your productivity. They make you stop what you’re doing to click a button to continue or ignore until the next day. It never ends. The software also tracks your behavior and connects and sends your information to their internet database and is a drain on your system resources. When you try to uninstall, it is embedded into your registry where it requires heavy research and multiple complex steps to remove it. The antivirus software has every characteristic of being spyware in itself. How ironic that the software we buy to help avoid spam and spyware actually causes it. These software upgrades are only to keep the virus settings ‘current’. There are other free options out there that will do close to the same thing. This upgrade is just another marketing scam and the software is garbage.
Many people have complained about the Windows ME (Millennium Edition) upgrade from Windows 98. It was apparently hard to install and had huge compatibility problems. PC World named this software one of the 25 worst tech products of all time. So, clearly, this was not worth the upgrade.
It gives me a headache just thinking about all of the upgrade offers and all the marketing ploys out there- all in effort to slide more bills out of your wallet in exchange for a product that in many cases, could be worse. Think twice before upgrading and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”