It’s a popular phrase these days, especially among salesmen, to refer to <insert their new product> as <product you already use> “on steroids”. Faster, more secure, more features, better..

..well I’m not so convinced.

It’s important to keep a sense of perspective when considering your software choices, as with any other choice in life. Why pay for something you don’t need or will only use a fraction of? Is that fancy gimmick really going to make your life easier or help your business earn more?

The Primate web monkeys do like to keep abreast of new bits of internet-related software but these days they’re coming thick and fast, all promising a myriad of features to make your life complete. There are a few simple things to bear in mind when choosing, and reading the company’s website or talking to the salesman for hours on end are not on the list.

Try before you buy: We can’t stress it enough! Can you actually use it? Is it intuitive? Can you break it or find any bugs in it? At Primate Designs we make sure our customers can “have a play” with our software whenever they want to, free of charge, and we don’t see why every company shouldn’t do this.

Make your own features list: Write down what you want from the product, not what you’ve been told you need, or what your current product does, but what you actually must have. Then you can write down all the luxuries and extra features that it would be nice to have. Compare them to the product feature list supplied by the manufacturer.

Read the support forums: There are plenty of products out there at the moment which look fantastic. They may have a really polished user interface and boast a fabulous range of features, but are fundamentally unstable. If the support forums are clogged with people asking questions as to why they cant get something to work or asking what is causing error messages, be worried!

As for “software on steroids” boasting more features than you can shake a mouse at, if you take a considered approach you may find that you barely use the features you have at your disposal currently and suddenly paying for even more seems like less of a great deal.

Remember; less is often more so keep it simple, stupid.

It seems a lot of people - myself included - are having problems with USB mice in Windows Vista. After a Windows Update, my mouse simply stopped working. The laptop’s touchpad was fine and the USB socket was also fine. After a bit of googling I found JustSomeGuy1’s thread on techguy.org with an apparent fix. The only problem was Vista wasn’t even leaving me a broken entry for a USB Browser Mouse in the Device Manager, to go and manually delete the bad drivers. Deleting things out of the System32 folder seems like a rather hands-on, roll-your-sleeves-up and get stuck in approach anyway - this is 2009 after all!

Simple fix:

• In Device Manager select the “Unknown Device”, right click and “Update Driver Software…”
• Select “Browse my computer for driver software”.
• Select “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer”.
• Choose “HID-Compliant Mouse”.
• Click “Next” and Windows will install the new driver (successfully I hope!).
• Enjoy clicking on things once again.

It’s a much friendlier fix for less savvy PC users, so I hope it works for you. I for one could not spend another day giving myself finger cramp with the touchpad on my laptop.