Dongles certainly can be fragile, and longer ones, such as the
z/PDT's (around 2 inches or so) can easily be accidentally torqued
and broken (or break the socket, whatever).
For that reason, I keep a supply of 6" long M/F USB cables which I
use to separate the dongle from the PC chassis. That solves both the
bump-it-and-break-it problem as well as damage from constant
removal-and-reinsert.
Dongles are valuable. 6" USB cables are cheap.
Just saying...
Dave Cole
At 4/25/2012 11:43 AM, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
A dongle definitely could be an issue for some. Might be less of an
issue on Linux, but my experiences on Windoze has been less than
ideal and makes me regard any application that requires a dongle as
more of a gamble. While the dongle may be regarded as "nice license
insurance" from the software vendors standpoint, it is essentially
just another point of failure for the user and lowers the value of the product.
My wife has some very expensive Embroidery software that requires a
dongle. The license does entitle her to run the software on
multiple platforms, both her laptop and desktop, since the dongle
prevents concurrent use. After a year or so the dongle case became
too loose to remove the dongle from the USB port - the only way now
is grasp and pull the dongle base with a pair of needle-nose pliers,
which works, but is certainly not the advertised convenience. The
only "support" provided by the application vendor to remedy this
situation is to re-purchase the software at full price to get a new dongle.
Other than using standard Windows GUI interfaces, this software does
nothing that special at the Operating System level, except for the
dongle support that requires a hardware driver written by yet a
different vendor. Logic would suggest that this application should
be able to migrate from Win XP to Win 7 without a problem, provided
one can find support for the dongle on Win 7. My initial attempts
to migrate have so far failed because the dongle vendor's current
drivers for Win 7 are not compatible with the older version dongle
that came with the application. I haven't given up, but unless I
can locate a compatible driver that is also compatible with Win 7
this expensive application is toast on Win 7. A nice result for the
application vendor if I'm forced to do an otherwise unnecessary
upgrade at great cost, but from the user's standpoint this is a very
poor outcome, apparently forced by the decision to require a dongle.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org
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