] [Thread] [Date] [Author]

["Dennis S. Wish, PE" <dennis.wish(--nospam--at)verizon.net>]

Bluntly; I don't like dongles. However, the Risa3D dongle is not exactly 
an inconvenience. It is a USB device and if you own a six or eight USB 
hub, the Risa3D dongle plugs in with almost no trouble. It is so 
invisible that it becomes easy to load Risa3D on multiple machines in my 
home office and simply unplug the dongle and move it to the hub I will 
be working on.
If you haven't read the latest PC mags, there is a movement to load most 
of your operating system and most used programs on a USB dongle you can 
carry on hour key chain. There are definite benefits to this since you 
can legally use the software that you are licensed for on any machine 
you happen to be near. I don't have a problem with this since I can only 
work on one machine at a time.

On the other hand, I have a problem with the USB dongle from RisaTech - 
but I can't complain since I have yet to call them to resolve the 
conflict. As I recall, the dongle requires too much power and I receive 
an error that I have exceeded the capacity of the USB port. Even if I 
plug into another free port I get the same error message.

I'm sure when I really need to use the software that Risa will respond 
with a solution, but I certainly prefer the USB dongle to most other 
forms of copy protection that are sensitive to what you have installed 
on your hard drive. I recently replaced a damaged drive with two 200Gig 
hard drives and a re-write DVD/CD combo. I had to contact Autocad and 
Microsoft as it was a significant change to make the software believe I 
was on a new machine or a different machine than I originally registered 
for. The fix was easy enough - but it was inconvenient as I noticed the 
problem on a Friday afternoon when I planned to work over the weekend.

In short, I thought I would be intimidated by the use of a security 
device such as a USB dongle, but the fact is that since I am the only 
licensed user for the software I invest in, then I have no problem 
installing and using the software as long as I am not restricted to one 
machine used one at a time.

To all of my Jewish friends - I wish you all a Happy New year. I wish 
for peace throughout the world and hope the coming year (the Jewish 
Calendar) will bring civility and peace in the Middle East. This is too 
small a world not to respect the belief and lifestyle of others.

Shalom!

Dennis S. Wish, PE

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