Photoscape gimp damaged drivers in win7HP 64

I tried to install Photoscpe gimp on win7hp64. Aside from trying to shove a lot of commercial bloatware down my throat, the installer ate my mouse driver (and who knows what other damage I haven't found yet) It SAID win7 at their website. This product crashed my fairly new computer for the first time. I can't speak to the program itself, since it doesn't work.

BTW if you rate a program on major geeks and get it wrong, how can you correct or delete your vote? I tried to give this a 1 but ended up giving it a 5 by mistake, and was then unable to vote again or correct the incorrecxt vote. I certainly don't want to help cause driver problems in someone elses computer. PLEASE CHANGE MY incorrect VOTE from 5 to 1!!

 

What extras are you saying that are in the photoscape package that are "bloatware"? There are extras that come with it, to allow you to do stuff with photos. What errors did you get, when your computer crashed?

 

Thanks for responding.
The bloatware was a whole series of things I declined, including Yahoo toolbar, and something that wanted to put a bunch of icons on my desktop that would point to commercial sites, but also a bunch of other garbage I don't remember specifically.

I'm a hardware engineer, so forgive my ignorance of software details -- perhaps "crash" was the wrong term. I got a popup message that my Logitech mouse software had been disabled, and I couldn't move the cursor until I rebooted. To me, if I need to reboot, that's a crash, but maybe I don't understand the fine points. The reboot did restore my mouse driver, so perhaps "ate" or "damaged" was the wrong verb and I should have said "disabled", since it was able to recover itself without my reinstalling from the CD --sorry if I misspoke.

The program did show up under "all programs", but it didn't work when I tried to run it. I got a small box and then it froze ("not responding"). I cleared that with task manager, then another box asked if I wanted to submit data to Photoscape about the failure, but by that time I didn't trust them enough to allow that, particularly in view of their draconian privacy policy, which I'd paraphrase as "we can abuse or sell any data we can figure out how to steal from your system". I rebooted again, and uninstalled (I hope) the program. I rebooted again for good measure, and things seem to be working, but without a full test-sweep that excercises all aspects of windows, who knows? BTW are you aware of such a test sweep? When I was designing industrial motion control products, all software had to pass such a sweep before release, and it was the first thing done to units returned from the field with reported problems that could be software-related. I'd love to have something like that for my PC...

This IS disappointing, since Adobe wants over $500 to update my photoshop and so on to run on win7-64.
It's also disappointing since I have been a big supporter of GNU-based software, and have generally had good luck with it -- and before this, I would have been predisposed to trust it, but after reading this "privacy" (NOT) policy, that trust is gone.

Thanks agin for your response, and I use the major geeks site often, though I don't log in much...

Please let me know if I can help in any way,
"Baysailor"

 

What, Chrome? There is no addons with Photoscape, other than Chrome. Gimp does not have any with its installer. Where did you download them from? If the program is freezing, there is something else wrong with your machine. How much RAM is installed, and what other programs are you running at the same time?

 

I got gimp directly from the Photoscape website (not via Major Geeks, though maybe I should have). I have 4MB of ram on a P6300 (HP pavillion G7), have had no previous problems with this sytem, and have had none since I recovered from this one...

 

I must be missing something; Photoscape (which I use regularly) and Gimp (which I have installed but rarely use) are two separate programs. I just uninstalled and reinstalled both and neither came with anything resembling bloatware.

This is the Photoscape download page:
http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/download.php

This is the Gimp download page:
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Photoscape asks if you want to install Google Chrome (like so many freeware products do) but can easily opt out of it. Gimp only installed itself.

 

Thanks for responding. I got gimp via the photoscape website. Perhaps the issue is with gimp, not photoscape. I'd be glad of that, and would apologize for my misunderstanding in that case. I knew they were two programs, but thought they were both photoscape products. Try going to photoscape's website and pressing the gimp button there and see what you get. Unless I was hijacked from there or something, I'm at a loss to explain all the stuff bundled into the gimp installer I ran, but that you did not see. Are you using win7-64?
PS if there was a WFT icon, I'd use it...

 

Again, I must be missing something. I don't see a Gimp download anywhere on Photoscape's website.

I have both programs installed on both a Vista 32-bit desktop and a Win7 64-bit laptop.

EDIT: I just turned off AdBlock plus in Firefox and saw the banner for the download. I downloaded it and scanned it and it is indeed a rogue version of Gimp. Gimp is at version 2.6 and the rogue is showing as 1.0.0.1. It's not from an official mirror and also not digitally signed by anyone that has anything to do with Gimp. Also, I'd never heard of the download site it came from, so that might be a cause of concern also. I'm sure the author of Photoscape is not aware of this. Did you scan the download before you installed it? I wouldn't trust a banner ad to save my life.

VisusTotal shows a bit of adware but nothing major.
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan...f743a15e723d471bf07d208748c23419d6-1316807420

 

Thanks, Sol
I can't find exactly what I saw before, but if I go here:
http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php
scroll down and push the "download" button, it takes me here:
http://go-downloads.com/gimp?gclid=CLiZ-Y2TtKsCFdCXpAodeVFafA
(ie gimp instead of photoscape) Am I being hijacked?
This is still different than the page I saw before, which had the photoscape and gimp download buttons side-by-side..
Thanks for your efforts...

 

Sol, Thanks for finding that rogue site -- I'll do a scan right away.
Since none of this is Photoscape's fault, can you delet my posts and apologize to them for me -- I hate to hurt the innocent. Maybe a warning about this issue is appropriate.
Thanks Again,
Baysailor.

 

No, I don't think you are being hijacked, like I said above banner ads will take you places you don't really want to go. The link you just gave downloads an installer, not Gimp itself. Something called the InstallIQ Installer Utility. That's likely where your problems started. There's a bit of adware in that too:
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan...0fd35b1087ec9447d5282a583bd6c3ef3e-1316783621

It was likely what installed all the garbage on your computer. Also, the banner ad seems to be rotating where it takes people, not a good sign.

This has nothing to do with Photoscape. Unless the owner of a website is very diligent about watching what banner ads show up, there's not a whole lot they can do about where they take a reader.

 

4mb RAM. What is that system, a old 8081? I did not know that those things could even run Windows, as slow as they were back in the day. I think that you meant 4gb RAM. Even with that much, photoscape nor Gimp are going to slow down your system, unless you are running tons of programs, and trying to do Torrents at the same time, or edit every photo in your my photo folder at the same time.

I ran Photoscape on my Acer Netbook with 2gb RAM with no problems, no slow downs.

 

Well, yes I meant 4GB of RAM -- hey only off by a factor of 1000...:-D
Yes I DID have an original IBM-PC with an 8088 4.77 MHz in it. I bet it still works, but it's not much use these days. I used to give it a fractal to chew on (at 640X480) and it would still be chewing the next morning...It put that Sinclair to shame, though...

And yes it WAS that installlQ thing that was running when things went wrong. Maybe you know the best place to post a warning about that.

Thank you both for your help, and I hope I've learned a lesson: go through major geeks to be sure you're going where you think you're going.

Again, is it possible to delete these posts? If Photoscape is innocent, I hate to give them a bad rap.

Hey, Photoscape developers, and webmaster -- please accept my sincere apologies for blaming you for something that turned out not to be your fault -- I HATE it when that happens to me -- and now that I have a clue, I'll try Photoscape again.

 

Always remember, when wanting to download software, always get it from here, or check through the forums first. Both pieces of software are good software. Photoscape there are some better tools out there, and some really good ones in the Ubuntu software store for professionals.