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Originally Posted by minstrel
I agree for the most part. Disabled, especially a version which will let me, e.g., edit a graphic or other file but not save it, turns me off - I just uninstall the software and I have never bought anything that had that sort of demo - it really doesn't allow one to try out the product.
Time-limited is fine, as long as the time limit isn't ridiculous: More than once, I've installed a demo, finally got around to clicking on it to try it out, only to be presented with a message box saying, "I'm sorry but your 15 day trial period has expired". Well, that one goes in the trash, too - 15 days? It takes me that long to find my other sock some weeks...
"Lite Edition" is also good, as long as I get a reasonable array of features to try and those features aren't crippled.
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But from the developers' side a time-limited trial is expensive to create as the cheaper protection systems have their information about your license state in a place that can easily be discovered with such a program as FileMon or RegMon (
www.sysinternals.com). The first one monitors the file-related and the second the registry-related measures (reads, writes) of specified executables. And there are always problems with expiring trials, at first it makes a mess from your registry and leaves rubbish there, and apart from this clock syncronization utilities can cause unordinary expirations by eg. time zone problems (I have had this problem and when I set back the time zone all my trials were expired).
Regards, Peter