Worst paid hpc program?

What hpc program have you purchased and immediately realized it was a waste of money? It can be for any reason, the program sucked, there's a better freeware version, the support sucked, too many bugs, whatever.

Since most H/PC developers provide trial versions.....overpaying on a poor software product should be a none issue.The problem may occur on the rare occassion when there is no trial version...in that case 'buyer beware'.

Having said all that....the most overpriced (in my opinion) and disappointing H/PC software I've ever purchased has to be Pocket on Schedule by Odyssey Soft. Selling for around $89 USD, I never could get all of the features to work properly on my MP 780 - very disappointing. I now sits collecting dusk!

Not sure if this really fits in, but ive had some programs that works great on one hpc, but when you move to another with a diffrent cpu, it screws up...

John, lol, the acronym for Pcket On Schedule is POS, fitting enough!
I agree the price is insane for the target market (us). I also consider Primer too pricy for us.

Some programs can't be tested well enough in the trial period, IMO. Especially programs where a lot of data might ultimately be collected.

I wouldn't put Primer in that catagory, because it does not meet your orginal criteria....

"What hpc program have you purchased and immediately realized it was a waste of money?"

Primer maybe overpriced, but I don't think it's a waste of money....I think it does a great job as far as I'm concerned.

This is not about my worst "paid" software programs - but how my worst "trials" let me to make the best choice in buying a program. I have a Hitachi Eplate with HPC Pro and an SH4 processor. I tried the trials for Artspen and Penreader to test a better handwriting program than what came on the Hitachi (Jot).

Both the Artspen and Penreader did not work very well on the Hitachi - they would knock out the soft keyboard and I would have to do soft-resets. One time with Artspen I ended having to do a hard reset because of conflicts with other programs. And that led me to try Calligrapher, which comes with its own soft keyboard (better than the Jot keyboard) and it existed easily on my handheld with no conflicts.

Ergo, I bought Calligrapher and also installed it on my NEC MP 790. It is the best handwriting software. You don't even have to train it too much.

Primer is too high, though I don't own it - Clint does mind.

well out opinions differ, i'm glad that i didnt have to buy primer (it came with my 900), it is unusably slow. ok the scrolling within a page is fast but page loading time is too slow for me, even though it does a great job of displaying the pdf in its entire glory

here goes:
I bought Symantec Act for CE 1.0 off of eBay for about $3 USD and then found out it was freeware... And even now I do not even use it...
EDIT: I tried the Primer 2.3 trial on my 360LX and it worked good... Although I cannot seem to justify 50 USD for it...

Edited by tenjeangosi 2006-02-14 7:05 PM

Clint does mind - what?

'unusably' ? I don't think it's a real word, but I like it!

Yes, page loading time is slow. but it's no more unusably slow than scrolling through a page in Pocket Acrobat 2.0 that contains several graphic images and waiting 7-8 seconds while the image slowly refreshes, everytime you try scolling up or down!

Like most software, they have their good and bad points....