Photoshop is slow to start, frustrating to use, doesn’t do half of what I require and can do fast and very easily with other, much smaller programs. Instead of this hog, I use PTLens (standalone) for automatic geometric lens distortion correction, Colour Science Image Editor for automatic dynamic range enhancement, Photobrush for perspective correction and Thumbs Plus for any tweaking that may be required after that. After that I can easily restore my original picture taking data using Exifer.

Under normal conditions, I can process up to one hundred pictures per hour using these small, inexpensive and sometimes free programs. Try to do it all in Photoshop! It may be a powerhouse for some, but in fact it’s just a jack-of-all-trades suffering from creeping featuritis. Just my opinion based on personal experience…

I’m also pleased to announce that, after less than a week working with it, Foxit PDF Writer has effectively displaced Adobe Acrobat from its throne in my system both in size (1.5MB versus Acrobat 5′w 50+ and 7′s 200+), execution speed (10x as fast) and resulting file size efficiency (4 times as small with same image quality!). On top of that it took me only days to master its settings from scratch, whereas it took me weeks to do the same with Acrobat.

As for windows 98, I agree with you about difficulty with hardware setup. If vendors weren’t forced by Microsoft’s omnipotent market hegemony to produce drivers for their more bloated OSes, we’d still be running Win98SE (or Win2K). The only reason to like the new fancy Oses, IMO, are the drivers written for newer hardware, nothing more. And about the interface… Let’s just not get into the style VS functionality debate

Thank you for your kind response and for letting us comment on this hot issue:)

Best Regards,
Chris in the Great White North (Still!)

And I wouldn’t want to use Windows 98 any more either, because even getting USB to work can be a pain. Wifi through 3rd party apps only, unicode support missing, etc, etc. Plenty of additions to software are simply caused by technological innovations. It’s only natural for Vista to be bigger than ’98.

I guess that things go wrong when things are basically ‘feature complete’ (your Acrobat reader example is a good one), or when software companies simply want their list of features to be longer than that of the competitor. Features for the sake of features.

And then there’s eye candy. Most ot the people out there probably like big, shiny, non-windows buttons in their applications. Any application sporting a dull grey Windows look will have hard competing with shinier counterparts.

Whatever happened to the sacred tenet of software design of efficiency and functionality? It would seem that this basic principle, that used to be taught when I studied computer science in the early 70s, has been completely forgotten!

Do software designers really believe it’s important to create more and more dumbed-down interfaces that actually prevent users from accessing basic functionalities? Do they truly believe the average user is an idiot? Why so much insistence on packaging and so little about actual functionality?

Worse, why do ALL major software companies seem to be following this trend? Nero, which has been severely decried here, with good reason, used to be much, much smaller and efficient that it is now. Try 5MB for a full version of the program, while at the time, its arch rival Adaptec Easy CD Creator (remember that name? ) used to take 5 times more, had lesser functionality and was on its way of becoming bloatware…

I still have a Windows 98 computer, simply because it works, and very, very well, thank you! The laptop I am using now unfortunately came with Vista and I have had to work very hard to get rid of the bloatware and to coax it to run older versions of software. Even for a power user, it is difficult, as Vista’s Big Brother ways are always in the way, preventing you to do things ‘for your own good’.

For example: Adobe Acrobat. The version I have on my Windows 98 machine (Acrobat 5) does EVERYTHING I need in a document, and I challenge anyone to list a must have feature in the bloated versions running under Vista. I REFUSE to even try the newer version. Are they nuts? Several HUNDRED MEGABYTES? Have programmers forgotten how to write efficient software? For the past few days I’ve been trying to install Acrobat 5 (approximately 50MB, which is already too large IMO), which does EVERYTHING on my windows 98 machine: create PDFs from my documents and grab websites for offline downloading, with fully functional links. If that doesn’t work, I’ll probably be switching to an independent such as Foxit PDF Writer, which does all the essential stuff in a… 1.5MB download!!! OK, it doesn’t have everything and it’s still buggy, but you have to and it that starting from a 1.5MB core, there is much greater potential for it to become stable and efficient while still remaining small and… I forgot to mention… FAST!

And what about Adobe Photoshop… Who, in their right mind, would want tio use such a monster? I am using Mediachance Photobrush and I would say the only thing a power user would wish for is layers. But at 1/100 the size of Photoshop, I can live without!!!

I could go on and on… I refuse to use Microsoft Outlook (I use The Bat), I refuse to use Windows Explorer (unless absolutely necessary), I use Norton File Manager (yes, you can make it work under Vista!!!) and Total Commander, I still use TopDraw, at 1.5MB (including clipart!!!), still the most powerful vector drawing application, designed for… Windows 3.1 and adapted to Windows 95 (!!!), and many other, more obscure programs that do stuff in a fraction of the size at many order of magnitudes of the speed of their mainstream versions.

In conclusion, it is still possible to get small, fast, efficient software that works for the user instead of for the software conglomerate giant that published it, but it has frankly become an uphill battle. With Microsoft leading the way with its more and more controlling ways, it is truly a challenge to do stuff in an efficient manner, but don’t despair, there is small but hard core of people like myself who simply refuse to go with the flow, who will find ways to keep these older, faster versions of software running, and there are sites dedicated to that and other brilliant but abandonned software. Just google “old versions” and “abandonware”… You are not alone

Just fyi, Digsby occupies about 25 megs of ram on my XP machine, which isn’t terrible.

For Windows Vista: Start > Type “msconfig” in the search bar at the bottom of the start menu.

That’s all for now. Sorry for rambling on….lol.

The way I deal with this is to always choose “custom” install method. Not the normal, recommended or full installtion they normally default at. Moral of the story is…. don’t just keep hitting return or next button. Custom install every time.

Thanks for the link to ImgBurn. Just downloaded it and installed. That will do me find the next time I need to burn an image to CD/DVD.

Just a little tip: Always keep an eye on your startup programs. The only two programs I set to run when logging in to Vista are Avira Anti-virus and Windows Defender. No other programs startup with entering windows.

To clear startup programs: Start > Run > Type “msconfig” and select the far right tab “Startup” and check the boxes that you need to start with windows and clear the boxes that you don’t need.

The msconfig is a system configuration utility which is perfectly safe to use. This will not only speed up the boot times, it makes your operating system run slightly faster due to less programs running in the background.

Now why not finish up with a defragment of your hard-drive. Hope this is of help.

Mark

On average I think mac software is less bloated, but since there’s such an abundance of Windows programs, I find there’s a lightweight alternative for everything. Miranda is the best example of just how good some of these alternatives can be. Adium has nothing on it imho.

Funny thing is that Windows users, at least on average, seem to like bloated software. How else could one justify Nero’s continuing dominance in a field where every competing program does exactly the same thing?