Touch the Future Now at Staples
- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 27 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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8 out of 8 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Not ready for prime time due to miserable bugs in the required PC software"
Pros: Good software on the device -- if you can get that far
Cons: Horribly furstrating getting the required software installed on the PC
Summary: This might be a great device once you can get it working, but getting that far may be an exercise in absolute, utter frustration. I literally had to debug and hack their installation software at every step in the process of getting the PC side up and running.
First, I put in the Companion CD that is supposed to kick off installation. Nothing happened. So I manually invoke the setup program from the CD. Nothing happens. So I then run the setup program in a debugger and finally I see an error message about some internal file. It turns out that my file associations for .hta files were missing. No idea how or why that happened, but there was no error message from the installer, nothing. Most people would have been dead in the water right there.
Then, their installer is prompting me to insert CD 1 of the included City Select software. And it refuses to acknowledge the presence of the CD, prompting me over and over. I can see the files on the CD from the Windows Explorer, or from the command prompt, etc, so I know that the issue is not with Windows itself, it is with their installer. This happened on 2 different machines, so it's not specific to any one particular Windows XP configuration.
So I try invoking the setup program directly off the City Select CD but it complains that it can't be invoked directly. So I try it on a third machine, and again using a debugger, I discover the special hidden switches that the Garmin installer passes to the City Select installer, and I am then able to invoke the City Select installer on the machine where I want it. That works. (Later, I had to maually copy some registry settings and files from the working installation on the third machine to get the unlock wizard running, but I suppose I can forgive that.)
So then I had things working, and I noticed that Garmin's web site has an update for the device software that's 2 releases newer than what's in the one I got. Their updater program is yet another piece of software that is not ready for prime time. When running it I got a whole variety of outcomes, such as "found new hardware" popups, error dialogs, and even "C++ abnormal termination" dialogs. And no update occured. Eventually after playing with this I was able to get the update onto the device but this was way, way, way, way too hard.
As cool as this thing might be, if you have some magical combination of programs or whatever on your Windows machine, you may never be able to use your iQue M5. They need some SERIOUS work on improving their PC software before this thing is ready for prime time.
- 1 reply to this review
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I'm not sure why you had so much trouble with the installer, since my setup was flawless. I agree that the PC software (in my case city select) could be a bit more user friendly with the GUI, but the install routine was fine on both my Laptop and my home and office PC's. I'm using version 6, so maybe yours is older, or your PC's were screwed up to begin with. From your comments, it looks like autoplay is at leaset disabled on your PC's.
Garmin iQue M5:
