How tough is your dongle?

[Wade]

How tough is your dongle?


Just wondering who might have worn-out his dongle. For some time mine would travel from home to work, and back home each day. That was my old Parallel and I always worried that it would go through the wash in the pocket of my blue jeans - never to function again. Well it never did, and it worked until I sent it in for a usb exchange. The USB dongle is working fine and I now have two at home and one at work so they rarely get out anymore. So has anyone got a story to tell how well one might hold up with frequent travel jumping from home to work, PC to Mac…?

Wade

[Miles]

:eek:

http://MAP-MEDIA.COM/-web/LW-USB.jpg

This is what you might call extreme USE not USB... :rolleyes:

I'll leave you to ponder the Cause. You aready see the Effect.

:D

http://MAP-MEDIA.COM/-web/MAP-LOGO-DUNES.jpg

[Karmacop]

Well I've had my dongle since 5.6, which was about 1999 I think? It hasn't done much traveling but it was going to college with me 3 days a week last year, but only for a few months. A number of times it has been pulled out of the computer while running, which is meant to be bad for it. That's about the extent of it.

[CTRL+X]

My dongle died a week after the first time I used it


got a new one and have had no dongle issues since

[archiea]

My dongle is really hard and it lasts for hours

Uh, what discusson is this?

:D

[SplineGod]

I saw one guy break a stack of bricks with his. :)

[Wade]

Miles,

I would think one could drive a car over His dongle and have it fair better! Did the desire to find out what goes on inside one take you over late one night and things got out of hand?


Wade :)

[Wade]

Miles,

Was it a case of " the dog ate my.."?

Wade

[DigiLusionist]

That's what happens when you play with your dongle too much.

[SplineGod]

Thats right, you either go blind or it falls off (in pieces). :)

[SLAYER]

Run Lightwave without a dongle. For a price, that is:

http://www.donglefree.com/

[CTRL+X]

Run my Lightwave without a dongle????? NEVER!!!

I tell ya, when I invite the lady folk back to my place and they see how big my computer is compared to other guys they know, they are very impressed,, BUT,, when I spin it around and they see the length of my row of dongles stick'n out !!!,, well,,,,, lets just say guys I have heard " Oh My god" more than a few times

[Karl Hansson]

A TIP: Use an USB extension coord with your dongle. That way you only wear on the extesion coord.

[Karmacop]

I don't see how that dongle free thing is .. um ... legal ...

[Bog]

My Old, Beige Dongle... ;)

Purchased: 1996.
Distance Travelled: About 14,000 miles (estimated)
Number of Failures: 0. (see note)

This little baby's been with me to London and back something like 2000 times (esitmated over 7 years' freelancing), has crossed the Atlantic with me, has been in more PCs than *deleted for reasons of good taste* and has never let me down. I thought it had died a couple of weeks back - I was heartbroken.

Turned out that the Parallel ports on the 2 PCs I was trying to use were flaky - still no dongle problems.

[Rich]

My original parallel dongle that i got with LW 6 went bad and then when i would try to boot up modeller it would show the program for about a second and then it would close. Luckily this started happening around the time LW 7 came out so I upgraded and traded my dongle in for the USB dongle. After that everything worked great until one day the number assigned to my donlge changed and then I had to get a new License.key number from Newtek. This was annoying because I also had to get new license numbers for all the plugins that are tied to your dongles id number. So far though the number hasn't changed since and its been over a year. *crosses fingers*

[Trulsi]

Karl: Thanks alot for the extension cord-tip!!! I'll do that right away:-)

[mattclary]

I had the same problem as Rich. Layout worked fine, but Modeler would just flash on the screen. Had mine since... 2000 or 2001, can't quite remember, it just died about 2 weeks ago. Oddly enough, it coincided with changing the refresh rate on my monitor!!! Freaking weird!

[Miles]

Hey Wade,

I WAS curious enough in my youth :D to take just about anything apart and I DO currently wrench on my motorcycle <PROJECT-SV dot COM> even though I'm not factory trained to do so, but I won't muck about with the key to my LW since I need it too much to risk having to run in LW-Demo mode for any additional length of time it would take to replace it, again... I did build my own PC though, sooo ;) J/K... The Dog Ate My Dongle is a good one, but naaa this was a more pathetic situation.

I was/am religious about keeping the dongle in one system port or another, but for whatever reason it was out and about (Fancy Free, if you will) and being as small as it is it was not seen when a big month vacuum cleaner's hose attachment came along and swallowed it up :eek: when doing a passer bye cleaning of the edit room. :o

NT was good about replacing it for me, BUT in order to get the parts to send in proving it was destroyed and to snap the pic I posted for ya I had to tear open the vacuum bag and sift through the crud in it :mad: in order to find the remains. :rolleyes: Live and Learn...

Along the same lines as Karl's suggestion I now have one dedicated LW (USB) keyboard with extra USB side ports where I keep the dongle connected at almost all times so now only the keyboard's USB connector is disconnected when switching between systems. When traveling somewhere with the laptop disconnecting it still can't be avoided.

Hope you enjoyed the pic of the USB... ;)

http://MAP-MEDIA.COM/-web/MAP-CITY-01.jpg

[Schwing]

My USB has seen the inside of my washer and dryer three times so far and more than 500 miles of travel a week for the past year or so and it's still ticking.

Cold water casual, medium spin (no presoak)
Dry on delicate (Bounce fabric softener)

:D

[Wade]

Three times!!! Washer and dryer!!!

I was sure that the static in the dryer would fry the little purple thingy. I will sleep much better knowing that it can survive such an ordeal.

Thanks - anyone else?
:)

[Bog]

Gosh.

I'm not sure that I want to swap my big, beige dongle for a small purple dongle, not matter how many lights it has on it.

I actually managed to say that with a straight face, I'm astounded!