A Warning: Free Starry Night From Orion-USA

[Dave In Vermont]

When a new ST80 OTA rolled in today, it came with a free CD-Rom of Starry Night, the planetarium-program that is quite good. Usually. BIG usually. But not this freebie-disk from Orion in the USA. Here you go - my tale of woe:

I put the CD in my drive and got the usual 'install' messages. 'Click' 'Click' 'Click.' Now it started spewing out error-messages faster than I could acknowledge them. It tried to uninstall my latest version of Adobe-reader. It tried to uninstall my version of ASCOM and replace it with something for Gemini Telescopes. By now I'd had my fill of this endless parade of ERROR! messages, and was trying to uninstall anything it had stuffed into my drives. "Are you sure you want to uninstall...?" YES! And another ERROR-message for trying to uninstall this monstrosity.

It took me several hours to scour every last hiding place it had burrowed itself into. At one point it sent me to the Starry Night website to retrieve a registration-code. And now the website was frozen and wouldn't respond - after having identified what disk it was trying to save itself from (my guess).

Orion also had another disk with a DVD movie about the solar-system. It should make a dandy pizza-cutter with a pencil stuck through the center-hole. As for the Starry Night disk, it made a nice Frisbee when I chucked it down the street.

You stand apprised,

Dave

[MarsG76]

What OS were you installing it on?

I had the errors initially also, but then I installed it using the "Run as Adminstrator" open option (even though I was already the administrator) and it installed and works well....

[Dave Lloyd]

I don't think I could be bothered making the effort.

[Tinker1947]

More than a couple of clicks would see it in my rubbish bin.......

[Dave In Vermont]

What OS were you installing it on?

I had the errors initially also, but then I installed it using the "Run as Adminstrator" open option (even though I was already the administrator) and it installed and works well....

I was on Windows 8.1, I am the admin. And if it told me about 'permission' for such - it would have taken it's flying-lesson even sooner. I mean - come on! It's a freaking CD-Rom with a free version of Starry Night. It's not the Professional-version of The SkyX! I can see that needing special handling. All this thing told me is to steer clear of Starry Night. I used to have a pro version of Starry Night - and it was very nice. So I'm writing a letter to Starry Night to give them a heads' up on the freebie out of Orion.

I just finished re-installing ASCOM and my drivers that the Orion-Bug managed to destroy. As for the telescope I got from Orion, that took me, maybe, 10 minutes to set up and swap out hardware on. And that CD-Rom took me several hours to fix all the damage it wrought.

Mess with an activist - see what happens,

Dave

[John]

Thats a shame - it gives a bad name to the Starry Night software which is very good. I have Starry Night Pro 6 and it's really excellent.

[Dave In Vermont]

Thats a shame - it gives a bad name to the Starry Night software which is very good. I have Starry Night Pro 6 and it's really excellent.

That's why I'll get in touch with Starry Night - to let them know so they do some damage-control. I have this image of the Frankenstein movie. Only in this version, Igor gives Dr. Frankenstein the Evil CD-Roms to copy the Starry Night onto.....

Dave

[triton1]

I hope this does not mean a reformat it,s the only way to be sure.

[orion25]

Congrats on your new ST80; I got an Astroview 6 reflector from Orion a few months ago with the infamous Starry Night Orion Special Edition CD-ROM. I ran it on a refurb computer with Windows XP OS. Didn't have any problems at all, but it is an older OS. Apparently, this little booger doesn't like newer operating systems (but there's still absolutely NO EXCUSE for this). I have Starry Night Enthusiast which is an awesome program and I greatly respect the company. I agree that you should get in touch and let them know about this travesty. I'd hate to see the company name tarnished by a buggy freebie!

Sorry about your cybernetic nightmare. Your report here may save someone from having a meltdown! 

Your buddy,

Reggie

[cjdawson]

Congrats on the ST80.

As for the starry night freebie, I get the impression that it's a version that was really destined for Windows XP.  So, yeah, fairly old by now.  The whole Run it as administrator is something that you have to do for software that's so old it doesn't know about the whole User Access Control feature of every version of windows since Vista.  The UAC stuff is supposed to stop software simply making changes to your settings without explicit user permission, however, it kinda doesn't work too well as you get senarios like above with older software, and we newer software you get the software asking for permission without actually telling you want it's going to do once it has permission.

That's why if I get something that I feel is even slightly dodgy, I install it on a virtual machine first to see if it's worth putting on my main machine.