Nero 8 Ultra Edition

Nothing ultra about Nero 8

Review of Nero 8 Ultra Edition. For years Nero Inc has been one of the leading sources of quality ripping and burning software, but don’t get your hopes up. The highly anticipated 8th edition of Nero’s software suite leaves a lot to be desired. Nero 8 Ultra Edition is a pain to install, it can cause registry problems if you aren’t careful, and there are bugs in the software that make it seem more like an early beta than a finished product. If you’re using a previous version of Nero, just stick with what you’ve got instead of upgrading to this clunker. If you’re not using Nero at all, look for other options or just pick up an older copy of Nero 7 and save yourself some hassle.

One of the biggest problems that I (and from what I’ve seen online, a lot of other people) had was that it really is a pain to install. If you’re using Nero products and are wanting to upgrade to Nero 8 Ultra Edition, you might as well get ready for installation problems. You need to do a clean install with no other traces of Nero software on your system… doing a quick-and-easy uninstall likely won’t cut it. The registry files for your previous software can actually interfere with the Nero 8 installation, causing you to end up with corrupt files that will just crash when you try to run the program. From that point you have to completely remove all of the Nero 8 files AND the previous files, or you’re just going to keep getting bad installs.

Assuming you can actually get the software to install without some major foul-up, you’re not out of the woods yet. In my experience it just doesn’t seem to like to handle DVD video at all, and I’ve had nothing but trouble out of Nero Vision (the component that’s supposed to convert and burn DVD’s.) Vision worked fine in my old copy of Nero 7, but with Nero 8 Ultra Edition I keep ending up with program crashes or system hang-ups when I try to burn a new disc. Other components haven’t fared much better; I also tried to make a slide show and found the experience to be frustrating only to wind up with the end result not being nearly as good as what I was hoping for.

The most frustrating thing about all of this, though, is that you can’t really get support from the company to help you with the problems. If you contact their email support it seems to be on a “maybe we’ll respond, or maybe we won’t” basis, with the emphasis being on the “maybe we won’t” part of it. Their online tech support is set up in kind of a blog format, too, which is just kind of weird… I could understand a wiki being used (as a number of companies are switching to that format for their knowledge base) but a blog just baffles me. I guess they’re trying to look “hip” for their customers. Of course, you can forget phone support… they charge by the minute, and I’m just not that desperate to give them more money.

In the end, I just went back and reinstalled Nero 7.

Review by Frank Newbury