Danny,
I just read your posts here concerning the problems you had activating DV Rack. I'm sorry you had trouble. Such reports from users of Serious Magic products are very rare
I, along with thousands of others have used SM's activation process with no trouble, even on machines not connected to the Internet. Any issues that occasionally arise with some customer configurations are easily resolved. A machine that has no internet access *and* doesn't have a floppy drive is a rare occurance. The rep that you sent your email to may not have known that was the situation he was dealing with. That's why I suggest that folks give us a call or post on our forums. Those methods of contact let us interact back and forth quickly to determine the situation and resolve it.
Also, you said that you need to register and activate to download the recommended update. This isn't the case as far as I can tell. The link you posted is accessible to anyone (I just logged out of SM access and tried it 'anonymous' to double check). Are you sure you couldn't get the update from our support pages?
I do have to respond to one statement that you made that is factually incorrect (so much so that it would be an injustice to leave it unanswered):
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"Maybe I could have gotten the answers I needed from their forums but they decided to keep it so private that others can't benefit from even just reading the posts there.
They are afraid people might say something other than praises for Serious Magic and DV Rack."
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Danny, our forums are *not* like other manufacturer's support forums. We do not keep them "private" to keep people from seeing what is said there. In fact our marketing folks desperately want to open our forums so they can use them to promote our legendary support and service. However, the USERS of those forums have voted to keep them private, exactly because they are such a valuable resource.
There is a thread here on our public message forums that you (and everyone else) can access that contains posts from our users about this very topic:
http://seriousmagic.ipbhost.com/foru...p?showtopic=68
I really encourage you to read the posts from real users, they say it better than I ever could.
I'm truly sorry things didn't work out for you Danny. We want all our customers to be happy. We're very proud of our insanely high customer satisfaction level (the highest I've ever seen or ever heard of in 20 years in this business). It's not completely flawless but it's pretty darn close. And it really is legendary among our users. That reputation is the result of a lot of hard work by our team of "Serious Magicians" above and beyond the call of duty. Just two weeks ago, a couple of users were having trouble installing a new downloadable 'service pack' for our Visual Communicator product (it worked fine for all the other users). These users posted on our user forums on Thanksgiving morning. The posts were seen by some of our staff who were checking the forums (on their own time, and on Thanksgiving). These magicians decided on their own to go to the office on Thanksgiving, investigated the problem, one of them contacted a senior programmer at home for a workaround and made a change on our servers to get the issue resolved. Total time to resolution: about four hours.
To others considering DV Rack, I encourage you to download the free fully functional demo of the software before ordering to ensure that it meets your needs. The demo is identical to the actual product except for the timeout and activation, so there should be no surprises. In the (very rare) event that you should have any trouble activating, I personally guarantee that we will resolve the issue quickly if you post on our user forums (I don't get the emails to our support department, so I can't guarantee that I'll personally help you if you email, but you will get expert help via email too). Customer problems are very rare, but if you have one, all we ask is that you give us a chance to fix it. On tough or unusual problems (even more rare) it may take a small amount of patience while we figure out what's going on, but hang with us and I promise, we *will* fix it.
--- Mark