Amazon reviews

A little over a year ago, I purchased an expensive Panasonic LM-BE50DE dual-layer rewritable Blu-ray disc. This 50 GB media cost me $50 from Amazon. It worked fine, so I posted a positive review, which has since received 3 helpful votes.

A year later, the disc has failed. And Panasonic won't replace it because they only have a 90 days warranty on parts, which includes media !

I attempted to change my Amazon review's star rating down from 4 stars to 1 star. But it was impossible. I could only change the headline and text of the review, but not the star rating. I called Amazon about this, and was told that this could only be done within 30 days of a review ! I think that makes Amazon reviews significantly less helpful if long-term owners of a product cannot update their reviews when they later encounter problems with them.

To be fair to Amazon, it appears that it's possible to delete the review, and post it again. I haven't tried that. But doing so would void the helpful votes that my original review received.

Annoying Cubase license scheme

Last week, I bought a pair of Yamaha KX61 keyboards to replace a broken organ. They came with a limited version of Cubase software, called Cubase AI. Unfortunately, the software refused to install on my Vista 64 box, crashing in the annoying license checker scheme. The exact error message was Syncrosoft Protected Object Server has stopped working.

After much research, I found the solution to this problem :
1. Disable DEP in Control Panel/System/Advanced/DEP
2. Reboot the computer
3. Reinstall Cubase
4. Re-enable DEP, with the exception of the SYNSOPOS.EXE program., which lives in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Syncrosoft\POS on my system, but might be in C:\Program Files\Syncrosoft\POS for those with 32-bit systems.