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I wanted to make a PBC copy of the Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) Master Collection, that I bought a copy of towards the end of my tertiary education phase, mostly so I could make use of Dreamweaver from home, as the computers we had access to at our college where rather under-spected to run the software. In hindsight it was a waste of money because I don't think I ever fully obtained the value versus the cost of the product out of it. - I think in my head I had this grand vision of becoming a great designer, or maybe it was that I read somewhere on Yahoo answers someone complaining about the piracy problem with adobe and had felt guilty about it.

I was interning at a company as a web designer (I wanted to go freelance) and I wanted to up my game, build a portfolio, but I spent all of my pay check(s) (and some of my savings) on this f#%k piece of plastic, I think I would have seen more value if I had gotten a copy of Visual Studio instead.

The software is buggy as shit, and I should have bought it piecemeal, or looked for a *Free* extended trial..., so I think I'm going to be stuck with it at least for the next 10 years. - so, as insurance I'm making a copy of the disk.

At first, I wanted to rip it to a flash drive, but found that I didn't have a drive with sufficient enough space to do this, flash storage seems to be the way forward as it's always faster than optical media but drives that are 8GB plus are still too expensive at the moment.

I did a quick check of the files in windows explorer and saw that the files are big at 8GB+, so I went out and bought some DVD Dual layer discs, only to discover that the .iso file I had made was actually 8.36GB and the DVD Dual layer discs I bought are only 8.5GB. - although I think that's represented as 8.05GB, it's hard to tell theoretically the contents should fit, but my burning software tells me otherwise, I'm sure there is something funky going on with the compression.

I figured I'd just compress it all to fit on the disc, given that I was using my new laptop to do this I needed to download some compressing software; first off, I downloaded and installed IZArc, and then I immediately remembered why I don't use this program anymore.

The IZArc installer automatically installs trojan virus malware toolbar bullshit, regardless of whether you uncheck the box that says, "install our garbage and set your homepage to a site other than Google", so f%$k me, I guess.

I installed IZArc a few years back and had the same thing happen, but I thought that was because I forgot to uncheck something, now after I read all these CNet reviews: (http://download.cnet.com/IZArc/3640-2250_4-12652435.html) I know now I was not at fault.

So, I lost about an hour uninstalling all the toolbar bullshit and I had to run MalwareBytes just to be on the safe side.

But my gosh, if that doesn't still annoy me to no end, I've been tempted to D-DOS mystartsearch(dot)com for putting their shitty toolbar on my system, f%$k those guys.

On the plus side, I'm currently working a service desk position at a new company and get paid good money to remove Malware so I already know what I'm doing, it's just not every day that I infect myself with this kind of garbage and I now have a better insight into how everyday users end up in this position, academics for example, people with multiple PhDs still managed to infect themselves.

Anyway, so now IZArc is installed, and I am able to compress the files down to about 6.68GB, this costs me another hour, but then I realised that the computer this was to be deployed on probably wouldn't have software installed for reading .7z files, so I converted it to a self-extract, tested it, and guess what it didn't work! - F%$k sake maybe IZArc is just shit?

So I figured I'd just download 7-ZIP and try that (which is what I should have done in the first place), but then I discovered that it doesn't have the component for converting .7z to .exe, so after some more googling I found a utility that could do that, and after I used that utility guess what, it didn't work!

So, from that I determined that it was probably a fault of the Windows 8.1 operating system, or it could be the fact that I'm on a 64-bit system, or some other administrative privileges or user account control bullshit.

So, I just gave up and burnt the disc with a copy of 7-zip, (both ripped and installer) on the disc.

The end.

TL;DR

>adobe bloatware

>IZArc botnet

>burning a DVD DL took a lot longer than it should have.