The computer man

[Ant]

HP is particularly adept at making completely bloated frontends for their consumer level printer's drivers. Seems a universal truth no matter what OS you use.

For 3 months, everytime I plugged my printer in it went through the re-installation process and I couldn't work out why.

Touch wood it seems to be fine now since I installed the basic driver from the HP website.

[marksi]

I dislike the fact it is about 60MB to download. I dislike how it seems to update every other day.

I agree.

(Sorry Sput).

That said, it's not as bad as RealPlayer.

[Jovis]

You can use Winamp with iPods.

[marksi]

You can use Winamp with iPods.

And Winamp is almost as bad. It used to be a nice friendly bit of software, then at some point decided to get aggressive with file types and starting itself too. So I dumped it.

[nidave]

You can use Winamp with iPods.

And Winamp is almost as bad. It used to be a nice friendly bit of software, then at some point decided to get aggressive with file types and starting itself too. So I dumped it.

It's all AOL's fault - winamp is full of bloat.

I can cope with iTunes as long as I turn off the services and stop the icons appearing in the notification area.

[lukey]

You can use Winamp with iPods.

And Winamp is almost as bad. It used to be a nice friendly bit of software, then at some point decided to get aggressive with file types and starting itself too. So I dumped it.

That point shockingly enough coincided with AOL's acquisition of Nullsoft.

Winamp has certainly gained a lot of baggage over the last few years, but it can still be quite painlessly pared back. By default it tries to eat file associations and adds a completely pointless systray pre-loader. Also, thankfully it's completely modular so it's possible to simply cut out any functionality you don't need.

It's still my media player of choice, but I still don't think the 'out-of-box' experience is what it could be, as far as it does little to quickly deter new users.

[marksi]

You can use Winamp with iPods.

And Winamp is almost as bad. It used to be a nice friendly bit of software, then at some point decided to get aggressive with file types and starting itself too. So I dumped it.

That point shockingly enough coincided with AOL's acquisition of Nullsoft.

'Nuff said.

[Nini]

As long as nobody mentions using Foobar2000 or *shudder* Windows Media Player.

[lukey]

I know a lot of people swear by foobar2000 - any reasons in particular for shunning it?

[Nini]

From my week long heavy use experience it really does require you to have a Linuxy sort of tunnel vision regarding making it work. Simple things become trials in whether your codec knowledge is up to scratch or not or render themselves near impossible when it shouldn't be. Makes VLC seem graceful and not at all "twiddly", great if you want to get down and dirty doing things which are one step away from doing your own compiling of the code but not so much if you just want it to play the fucking song already.

I'm able to pare Winamp down to what I've had it like since 2.3.4 so I continue down that route as it doesn't seem to enjoy my pain unlike foobar which I swear the icon really does want me dead.