Found a way to get a refund from Adobe !

[echavez123]

I bought Adobe Premier Elements software for the purpose of creating a Movie DVD from a customer's digital images. The software cost $90. I tried it and it took about 1 hours to process 40 images. Then I tried 80 images and the program hung and would not recover. After 2 days of screwing around, I came to the conclusion the software DOES NOT WORK. So, I called Adobe support.

Four support cases later, and about 3 hours on the phone with support, I gave up. They concluded I would get a refund in 2-4 weeks. Three months later, nothing. Finally, I reported the incident to the Better Business Bureau in San Jose, CA and to the Federal Trade Commission. Three weeks later, I got my refund !!!

My only regret is that I wish the FTC would force Adobe to take the software off the shelves all over the country. I cant imagine how many people run into this problem and give up cause they get frustrated with the red-tape barriers planted by Adobe support. What a ripoff!

Ernesto

 

[framah]

...and it only cost you more than the $90 in your time to get it back.

 

[framah]

I also think it probably wasn't the software that was the problem but your computer was not powerful enough to handle what you wanted it to do.

 

[Jim3535]

I also think it probably wasn't the software that was the problem but your computer was not powerful enough to handle what you wanted it to do.

That's no excuse. If the program requires a more powerful computer, it should warn the user up front. It's just lazy programming to let people try stuff only to watch it inventively fail or crash the program due to foreseeable circumstances. Adobe has a very bad reputation for writing software with tons of bugs. This is probably just another one of them.

 

[framah]

Just because it will technically run on a certain OS doesn't mean that you have a fast enough processor to make it go quickly.
If I run PS3 on my old Mac G4 it might take 5 minutes to complete a task I gave it but would only take less than a minute on my much faster MacPro.
There is no way they could, would or should warn you about something that you should already know... that any program will work quicker with a faster, more powerful computer.
Sometimes, giving a program an enormous batch of images to run at the same time will bog it down so much that it effectively locks up. You might consider processing in smaller batches and then joining those files together.
I could probably bog down my MacPro by giving it 8 or more 400Mb files to merge at one time but if I gave it 3 at a time and merged them down into one image and repeated the process, I could have my final image with out overloading the program. It's all a matter of realizing the limits of the tools at hand and working within their capabilities.

Yeah, Adobe is so bad that they are the largest image processing program out there. Must be all those people who love to play with bugs.

 

[Jim3535]

Yeah, Adobe is so bad that they are the largest image processing program out there. Must be all those people who love to play with bugs.

Adobe's popularity has more to do with the features their software offers and the fact that they were an early market leader.

The sad truth is that almost all software is written to be "good enough". The exceptions being super critical systems like the computers that run the space shuttle. Although even they have design limits, like not being able to operate through a year transition.

Since computers are complicated systems with lots of things that all need to work properly, it's often hard to determine the source of a problem. When things crash or go wrong, most people just curse Microsoft and move on.

As for Adobe stuff, I've ran into plenty of bugs and glitches myself. I suspect that most people, myself included, just learn to work around them. Don't process too many RAW files with ACR or PS will crash; don't adjust the crop in lightroom right after switching images or the crop will go crazy, etc. People just put up with it because they can still get their stuff done.

Allowing any given workload to lock up a computer is still crappy programming. Normal programs run multiple threads so the user interface is still responsive when huge tasks are running. Decent programs also give an ETC for long tasks. At minimum there should be an indication that the program is running and an option to cancel or abort the task. iTunes is one program that fails at this. The entire program will freeze for up to 30 seconds at a time, multiple times when syncing ipods. This is just one of the reasons that I only use it for managing content on ipods; it just sucks as a media playing application.

 

[echavez123]

I also think it probably wasn't the software that was the problem but your computer was not powerful enough to handle what you wanted it to do.

You are absolutely right! However, I am not sure how powerful a computer I would have needed. Nevertheless, I bought another program "Pro Show Gold" which had more bells and whistles than Adobe's and generated the DVD files in minutes. I processed 670 images and burned them to 3 DVD's in less than 1 hour.

So, my computer was fast enough with another (superior) product, but not powerful enough for Adobe's ####.

Ernesto