Category: the Rant Board
Upon installing the latest versions of Jaws featuring the Internet license manager software, I made a sad discovery where laptops are concerned. The ILM constantly accesses the hard drive to check the status of its authorization state. This means that while trying to maximize battery performance, the hard drive never powers down, thus draining the battery at a faster rate. Hello! I thought screen access software was supposed to be transparent? This ILM scheme is intrusive at best, and at worst, is just as clunky as AOL, or Microsoft Genuine Advantage. I am, and have been a paying customer since 1998, and as such, do not appreciate this company installing things that compromise the performance of my computer. This is unacceptable, and I would encourage everyone to email Freedom Scientific, and demand that they reevaluate their ILM copy protection. Their diskette version, although inconvenient, was not paranoyed, and did not validate all the time as this method does. In fact, you could add or remove hardware, repartition hard disks, change clock speeds, and anything else without it making you reauthorize. You can do none of that with this new method. Freedom's answer, "Get a dongle!" Why do I want to hang a piece of hardware off one of my few USB ports to run Jaws? Not even most music software makes us use a dongle anymore! The problem is not mine. It's Freedom Scientific's.
This company has consistently teluged us with crap since the merger, and it's time for a change.
Jesse, I totally agree. I'm almost tempted to switch screen readers, because of this stupid ILM scheme. I bet window-eyes doesn't access the hard drive that much, lol. I also found this out when installing a sound card, turned my computer on, and what do ya know? "start activation dialog....".blah blah blah!
Nope. Window Eyes does not access the hard drive every few minutes. It allows power management to do what it was built for.
My computer's hard drive shuts down after 10 minutes, just like it's supposed to. I use an ILM JAWS. I still don't like ILM though. At least I figured out a way to keep the same locking code and key after a windows reinstall.
I request a reset of my keys so much they probably wonder what the heck is going on with me, :-)
Troy
i've never had that problem, and would you want people just picking up a floppy disk that has the code on it and registering their software? thsi is a more secure way to get aproved software