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(More customer reviews)I'd been looking at TruPrevent Personal, and when I got a 20% email coupon from Panda, I took the plunge. I wish I'd done my homework first --would have saved myself a HUGE amount of trouble.
After installing TruPrevent, the installer needed to restart the computer. But the PC went into a reboot loop, and just kept restarting itself over and over! I had to intercept with safe mode to get it working again.
Once I finally got the computer to start up, I had lost Internet and network access. This was apparently a known bug with TruPrevent, and Panda had an update on their website -- but if I hadn't had a spare laptop that wasn't disabled, how would I have found that? So, I downloaded the update and patched the software. Although I could access the Internet again, many more problems surfaced.
First, Outlook 2003 was suddenly unable to send or receive email. Also, my current antivirus immediately reported "conflicting third-party software" and could no longer scan incoming email! (Panda claims TruPrevent works with every current AV program.) I began getting random "Page not found" errors when surfing the web, and after a few minutes of being on the Internet, my browser would just stop responding. Also, my bootup time went from 1-2 minutes to over ten minutes!
I searched the web, and found a number of user reviews on download sites, with users having the same problems with this software. Dismayed, I ran Panda's uninstaller to remove it. But it wouldn't uninstall!
The Panda uninstaller went through the process of removing files, then restarted the computer. But upon restart, I had NO network or Internet connection, my LAN card was disabled, and my connections said "Limited or no connectivity"! Even worse: the Panda icon was gone from my system tray, but a number of Panda processes were still running on my PC! And my AV was still reporting a "third-party software conflict".
I desperately sent a Panda Support request. Despite claims on their website that email would receive a "prompt and thorough response," it was FOUR DAYS before I received a reply. And what I got was a complex manual-uninstall procedure that required performing all of the following (in safe mode) just to remove this software:
-- Downloading a special EXE file from Panda to remove certain components
-- Manually removing 19 SEPARATE REGISTRY ENTRIES from my Windows Registry
-- Manually deleting program files and folders (which didn't work because the system still saw them as "in use")
-- Manually deleting 9 other DLL and SYS files from the system folders
After all this, my computer is finally free of TruPrevent. Immediately after doing all the above, my LAN card works again, my connections are fine, my AV is running normally, my boot time is back down to about a minute, and I can connect to the Internet and my home network again.
If you are considering this program, PLEASE do a little Googling first, and read for yourself the experiences other users are having with TruPrevent -- and with Panda's tech support. I found user reviews reporting the reboot loop, loss of Internet/network, refusal to uninstall -- clearly these are not just isolated problems.
This program may be a good idea in concept, but it REALLY wreaks havoc on your system. My AV program has heuristic detection built in, and I will be sticking with that from now on.
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