Just not doing DA also seems like a tremendous high price, Mumblefratz, especially for a player and fan of your stature. Why don't you put it on your drive for just long enough to finish your purchase of DA, then uninstall it? Barring that, why don't you talk to sales@stardock.com about converting your purchase type to 'with disc' and get them to Mail you one?

I really don't think SD is going to change the SDC distribution protocol for DA at this point, so if you are holding out in protest, isn't it kind of moot?

drrider

You don't understand the depths of my madness. Uninstall doesn't really uninstall. Countless resistry keys are left in a modified state. Often system services that are created solely for the purpose of the installed program are left in place and started automatically and remain once the original program has been so called uninstalled. I have no knowledge that SDC does any such thing however I also have no knowledge that it doesn't.

In the few cases where I have installed something that I intend to uninstall I will take a disk image of my drive from a floopy boot and store it on a secret hard drive partition that I have or on a DVD. I will then do the install and accomplish what it is I wish to accomplish and then restore the disk image as it was prior to the installation. In my mind this is the only method of uninstall or of backup and restore that is truly valid. However, any effect of the installation such as the update of GalCiv2 would disappear once the disk image is restored. It truly is the only thing that gets you back to identically what you originally had.

Actually my purchase of DA in the Beta period last year was with disc and I've had the disc since this March. However, this only gets me to v1.5 of DA and DL and to get beyond DA v1.5 requires me to use SDC. I may perhaps use this method to get me from DL v1.4x to DL v1.5 but from what I've heard there's little point to do this.

At this point I think my best hope to get the latest and greatest DA and DL versions on my machine without using SDC is to buy the TA expansion and then once I get it I could install v1.5 of DA and DL from the CD that I have and then I can use the TA CD to update my DA to the latest version and install the initial version of TA. At that point my only issue will probably be that the TA from the CD will probably become out of revision rather quickly and I'll be unable to update it without SDC but at least I'll have the latest DA and DL to play with.

Kind of circuitous but I think it gets me to where I want to go in the manner that I want to get there.

Not sure as I care much for this either unless you're in total control of when you decide to update. For example I never allow windows update to run on my machines, I explicitly scan for and allow only updates that I want when I want them. In fact I don't want my computer to do anything without being explicitly told to do so by me. I've disabled the task scheduler system service in my attempt to avoid this. I'm very old school and believe that a PC is a Personal Computer. When I'm not using it I expect it to sit there like a lump of metal, silicon and plastic. I pretty much gaurantee this by powering off my machine when not in use. I also object to the power button being essentially a power off request button. I prefer my power button to actually switch off the AC to my machine. I actually installed a line cord switch in the power cord to do this so that those annoying leds don't stay on all night long. HAL will not start with my PC that's one thing for sure.

Good thing I don't take myself all that seriously or I truly would be nuts. However, I grew up in simpler times and I often think that we've really made no progress with all this added complexity.

I miss the days when you bought a new PC and all you had to do was take the hard drive from your old machine any pop it in your new machine and it would boot and operate exactly as the old machine except perhaps a little faster. I miss windows for workgroups 3.11 where the OS consisted of perhaps a few hundred files in a few tens of megabytes. I pretty much knew what every file on my computer was for and why I need it. Basically you had 4 files that controled every aspect of the PC; autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini and system.ini.

Now I have 3.5 Gigabytes of god knows what doing who the heck cares and in all reality effective system level performance is perhaps ten times what we had in early 90's. This is with machines with proccessing speeds thousands of times faster, memory speeds hundreds of times faster and bus interconnect speeds dozens of times faster.

You used to "own" your PC and all the apps on it. Now you merely license their use in explicitly proscribed situations. God forbid you change your video card and at the same time add more memory. You may suddenly find yourself calling Microsoft trying to explain that you're not really a pirate and could they please turn your PC back on for you. Of course they will as long as you have a valid credit card number and agree to digitally sign a statement promising to not pirate in the future. In the meantime China is essentially pirating everything under the sun and no one says boo about it because China owns the bulk of all US Treasury notes. Is it so shocking that I can't really see the benefits in all this so called "progress".

As I said if I took myself too seriously I truly would be nuts.

Simpler times, eh? I recall when my brother, half alseep, accidentally executed a del *.* command in c:\windows (3.1). Thankfully DOS 6 had undelete, and I was able to recall the first letter of every filename in the windows directory and restore everything to perfect working order.

Anyhow, as noted in another thread, the future 2.0 update mentioned on the release schedule post will probably get a standalone package.

A necessary and sufficient step on the path to manhood. However if you didn't have undelete or the memory of the first letter then it only took three floppies IIRC to do a reinstall. Yes you then had to reset up win.ini and system.ini and that did usually build some character but you at least had a snowball's chance in hell of getting a basic grasp on how things worked. Now that proverbial snowball has a far better chance than I of understanding the inner working of today's PC.


Yahoo! Where is this wonderous news posted? I'm off to search for it as we speak.