Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Moronic Tech Support from Techsmith / Camtasia

The advice on how to remove TACC (Techsmith Audio Capture Component) was incorrect and apparently does not take into account the location of the kernel extension under Yosemite 10.10.3.  Their advice was to unload it from /Library/Extensions but it's not in there.  Issuing an unload command in terminal against the /System/Library/Extensions where the extension actually lives will not make it dead.

There's no question the TACC extension in /System/Library/Extensions belongs to Techsmith as I've browsed the package contents and their name is all over it.

After twelve hours, there has been no response to my return question with their tech support.

You can write your own editorial.  They write software, don't know where it goes, and don't know how to get it back out.

If the Apple Store wants to do a clean install, I won't resist.  My document files are copied off the system disk and there's nothing much else on there.  The apps will have to be re-installed.  There doesn't seem to be any other way to get Techsmith out of the computer as I don't have time to wait for their tech support to catch up.


Here's an example of Techsmith tech support:

To uninstall Camtasia for Mac first ensure that Camtasia is not running; once you are sure the application is not running go to your Applications folder (Command+Shift+A) and locate the Camtasia for Mac icon. Click-and-drag the icon to your Trash bin and then Empty the trash. This will remove Camtasia for Mac from the computer.

The above is complete crap and will leave over a dozen of their files in your system.


As to the probability this is the actual source of the problem, that's going through the roof.  When they don't know where the software went, it's patently obvious it was never tested under Yosemite 10.10.3.

1 comment:

David Elbert said...

I had the same problem. The taco.kext is located in /Library/Extensions/ on my machine (running Yosemite 10.10.5). That's the Library folder that is located at the level of the hard drive itself and not the one in the System folder or the one in the user folder. You can find it in terminal with: c /Library/Extensions and then "ls -l".

You can delete the kext from the Finder once you know where the bloody thing is!