OK Now - I Stop Giving Up

Its been one of the tech weeks. XP Home on the laptop has always driven me nuts because It Doesn't Network, despite the fact that when I bought it, and raised the issue, the sales guy gave me the "Nah, only if there are more than 10 connections" line. He lied

My mate Dave and I have been trying to fix it. No bleeding joy, I still can't see any other machines on my LAN. Then they tell me there is no upgrade path from Home to Pro, turns out there is for $305AU. I'll think about that for a bit.

Nor can I use any Torrent client. Dave, who doesn't even live here, can login to my WiFi and Bittorrent till he's blue, but he has Pro doesn't he?

Then, as I mentioned the other day, the screen saver stopped working suddenly. But I've tracked that to a pernicious little piece of software that somehow interrupts the process, but more to the point, doesn't, really doesn't, do what it claims.

Ever since I got Skype I've been hankering for a simple tool to record conversations so i can start interviewing people and providing the results for re-use. There are hundreds of great people in projects in the Stockholm Challenge that I'd love to talk with, lots of people in other places whose experiences would be great to capture and archive.

Problem is, it ain't simple. Then, the other day I came across a review of something called HotRecorder. I downloaded the free version, which is crippled and says so. It records conversations (free version max time 2 mins) also acts as an answerphone and will email you a copy of the message someone leaves.

I tried it, it was simple, it appeared to work, so I stumped up my $15.

Turns out the "Premium version is also crippled. It still only records 2 mins of the chat, the mail forward ONLY works with Outlook (you don't find that out till you unlock) it, the answerphone picks up the call from MY end and runs the message, but doesn't pick up from the other end, when the 2 mins are up, it just goes back to ringing. Oh, and the owners of this fiasco don't respond to their support emails.

And to boot, it screws up the screen saver/ display power off settings. Flick! Gone.

Now I'm experimenting with another tool called KiskKish which is officially linked with Skype, so I'm hoping it does what it says it does. No doubt it will cost me another $15 to find out the hard way.

If you have any experience with it, give us a kish OK?

Comments

[Rachel Lawson]

I can hardly believe we're talking about the same Hotrecorder.
I have the premium version and I've been working for the last few months with it, quite intensively, recording my Skype talks.
My experience is excellent. Hotrecorder works like a charm. It never fails one. Recording quality is amazingly good and the indexing feature which allows you to retrieve recorded conversations is really very nifty.

[Earl Mardle]

Hi Rachel,

Congratulations, have you ever tried to contact the business? How did they respond? How long did it take?

AFTER all my hassles, I finally went to their community site and it DOESN'T make for pretty reading. The technical support is littered with stories like mine and this is typical.

"I wish I had read this forum BEFORE I bought this program. It worked great ONCE! Now it is worthless, tech support isn't doesn't respond to questions. How do I get a refund? BEWARE people thinking of purchasing this program, one use is not worth the price. I uninstalled and reinstalled it 3 times w/no luck OR help from this manufacture. Keep researching online for something that will work more than once."