Saturday 25 January 2014

"Misleading" is the politest term I can think of to describe this . . .

For more years than I care to remember, I have been a user of the old "Norton File Manager" application in its various guises (e.g. it was packaged as part of Norton Navigator some years ago).  Back in the days of DOS I used XTREE a lot, and "NFM" seemed to be the logical progression from that.

Now, I have to admit, NFM's days are numbered as it doesn't work reliably under Windows7 - it keeps on crashing with "Smartheap" errors.  Upon look for an alternative I came across something called "WinNC" which purports to be a "Windows Norton Commander Clone".

There was a "try before you buy" download available so I thought I'd give it a go.

Frankly it's far more flashy and cumbersome than NFM ever was, but it seemed to work reasonably well, and eventually I felt tempted by the popup splash screen you get when you start the application :-


Consequently I decided to have a little look at the purchasing options, as just less than 20 Euros was quite tempting.

Upon following the link what I was presented with was this :-

. . .which got me somewhat annoyed!

Trying an alternative route and looking at the GB Pounds options produced this :-

. . . so I really don't think I'll bother, in fact I think I'll uninstall it and look for something else!

I understand perfectly (thinking of a famous quotation my Mark Twain) that taxes are unavoidable, but that isn't the point here.

Which as a shame really, because at the price quoted in the application splash screen I was sorely tempted.