Mr. Washington Goes to China

[billroper]

When we left off, our hero was contemplating the problem of George Washington's Computer and its stubborn refusal to burn DVDs using the software that he was using. The original camcorder software from Panasonic simply refused to play along when it got to the disk burning stage. The trial copy of Sony Movie Studio Platinum was giddily crashing the entire system and causing it to reboot without human intervention or even the courtesy of a Blue Screen of Death.

A truly clever person might have figured out how to put the trial version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum on the studio computer in the basement, which is running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 with more RAM than George Washington's Computer can even address, and see if it was possible to burn a DVD there. But it was getting late and I was not that clever.

Instead, I went browsing again and found some trial software from Wondershare, a Chinese company, and figured why not try it?

Well, it turns out that their trial software burns the DVD with a ginormous watermark. But it did, however, burn the DVD.

So I paid the $40 and bought it. Because, as Gretchen cogently pointed out, $40 is a heckuva lot cheaper than $1600, which is what I would spend building a new machine. :)

Remarkably, although I made a purchase with my Discover Card from a Chinese company late last night, I have not yet been contacted by Discover Fraud Prevention.

Yet.

And, having paid for and registered the software, I was able to burn some DVDs without watermarks.

Which is good.

So George's computer will be around for a while longer.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

What sort of "watermark" is that? I'm assuming it doesn't actually print anything on the DVD surface.

I'd be wary of installing software from a Chinese company I'd never heard of (and from at least one very big Chinese company I have heard of). Hopefully it didn't install any spyware.