Beware the upgrade

[Barefoot]

I should have addressed this before now because I know some of you are using Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro.

I had used it for a little over a year myself when the announcement came that there would be a release of Silver Efex Pro 2. I received an offer from NS to pre-order the upgrade at a reduced price, so I jumped on that like white on rice.

When the long awaited day of release came NS sent me my serial key and a download link. I went straight to the iMac and jumped through all the hoops to get it installed. It was quickly apparent that it was all they promised it would be. Here was a huge improvement over what was already the best B&W rendering software on the market.

There was only one problem.

My less than one year old Dell Insperion 1760 laptop couldn't run the upgrade. It never had the least bit of trouble with the old version, so I got on the line with support. Lo and behold, it came to light that the new version required a dedicated graphics card whereas the older version got along just fine with the shared resource card built into the motherboard found on the majority of laptops selling for under $1200. Bummer.

To make a long story short, rather than use the new version at home and the old one on the road (most of the time I'm on the road working and sometimes have to walk into a Best Buy just to remember what my iMac looks like) I sprang for a new Samsung with a dedicated Radion card. Problem solved, I guess. Just seems to me like that was something NS might have thought was important enough to mention up front. No wonder they don't offer beta versions like Adobe does. NS offers great software, but their marketing sucs.

My daughter-in-law is enjoying her new Dell.