Sneaky Network Magic

I was getting some weird printing errors on the Dell laptop last week. Visual C++ runtime error, followed by program termination. That's weird, it was all working OK and nothing had been changed.

I went to the printers console in the laptop, and it said stuff like spooler service not running on the main HP PC where the printer was shared from. Hmmm. I opened the printer in the HP. Indeed the share had been turned off. That's strange, I didn't turn it off.

So I clicked the Network Magic console. It showed a message indicating that the free trial had expired and I had to upgrade to enable printer sharing. Their GUI implied that there was no way around this to turn printer sharing back on. Luckily I knew better and just turned on the share manually. After that I went back to the Dell and did the printer discovery wizard again and it all worked.

That was pretty dirty and deceptive of Network Magic. First they "helpfully" set up a shared printer, then they go and turn it off without my consent. Then their GUI is extremely deceptive, acting like they were holding my shared printer hostage until I gave them some ransom money to release the shared printer lock they had put on.

I'm glad I don't work for them. This to me is very unethical, basically Network Magic is acting like a trojan. That must have sucked for the programmer who had to write that feature to turn off printer sharing and then try to dupe unsophisticated users into thinking they had to pay off the Network Magic shakedown to get their printer share back up.

Make no mistake: the printer share is not created or owned by Network Magic. It is part of Windows itself. It is owned by the PC user. The user is free to manually turn on printer sharing with no assistance at all required from Network Magic. That's true for all of the other Network Magic features too, file sharing, wireless security and access lists, all of it is part of Windows and the user can easily set up all that stuff himself using the GUI in Windows.

If you want to pay for their nice, intuitive GUI for the above features, then fine, that's your choice. But their guerilla bait and switch marketing is very bad.