Complaint Review: GFI Software - Clearwater, FL 33755 Internet

Thank you for that. You did not insult me since you did not create and sell that particular software program.

Frankly, I am fed up with of companies advertising and selling products to us that don't perform as promised. Then the software companies try to blame consumers or consumers' equipment for the company's bad products. Even large software companies do this! Buying software and then installing it is not difficult or rocket science.

Take care.

Ok, I now see where I was wrong for placing the remark I made, and I hope you will accept my appologies for it. I did not in any way mean to offend anyone and hope you will not hold it against me. I guess this is what it took to straighten out my understandings of Rip-Off Report. Sorry Again,James

You may think you know best. However, since you did not have your computer really messed up as many of us did, why do you bother to respond? Your success with the software does not negate the problems that we  had. I even had no problems with the previous version of this software. That still did not help when this version screwed up my desktop.

Your thoughts won't help us now, after the fact! As I said, I am a retired computer professional and do not need your advice at this late date. Plus, I would not bother wasting my time complaining about software that worked!

No matter what I knew or didn't, the company selling this product (HSN), repeated almost every hour for the 24 hour sales period that one would not have to remove their old anti-virus/anti-spyware software because this program would automatically do so. I, for one, should have known better.

If you can even find them on HSN, you should read the numerous complaints for this product. It has been a while and they might have removed them. So many computer professionals and novices were thoroughly disgusted, while a few had to buy new computers.

I will state it again. Companies should make sure their software works well before selling it!

I have purchased the VIPRE Security Suite, and have had no problems with it, it has worked great on my internet system. I've tried quite a few internet protection systems,and have decided this is the one for me. Alot of people don't seem to relize, when you find one, you need to lose the other, because they can and will work against each other.And check it out on just the "internet security" see who has the most and least filed against them. 

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A new market has opened up, is the "Reputation Market" GIF is a company based in Malta (guess why... to scam the tax system? to avoid legal prosecution?) that knows nothing about security beside some basic concepts.
They know much more abour marketing and understood that, if their reviews are used by giants of internet like google, consumers and customers will come as a consequence of that. not as a consequence of their (doubtful) quality.

So they made agreements around, for instance with s****.> That leads companies hit by their (99% of cases) false positives to become or to get closer to be customers of GFI.
I can imagine their structure: lots of marketings and bla-bla agents to make a google office sign the agreements, 1 technician in china and their legal site in Malta.

Well, dear GFI, you look like a scam.

GFI,

I am an experienced computer professional and know what I am doing! I recently retired as a corporate, IT computer trainer and support professional (for over 30 years) and am expanding my own small business. I was fooled by all the advertising HSN touted regarding your 2013 product! I thought it would speed up my computer, stop me from having to upgrade new anti-virus software every year, etc.

You can say whatever you want to ortry to  blame me and my computer for your horrible software! However, I know better and reject your blame! My computer, with years worth of my professional documents, graphics, presentations, music, etc. was working fine with no problems before I installed Vipre 2013! So, after trying to install Vipre 2013 over a week ago, now a virus causes random music, ads, radio spots to play all day, I cannot reset my firewall, my web's homepage has been corrupted (not on my other computers) and I can no longer install other anti-virus software.

I even had been using a previous version of Vipre (2012) on my computer, which I understood would be automatically removed and then updated with the 2013 version. Though Vipre 2012 scanned rather slowly, I had been using it since I purchased it in January 2012.

The faster computer speed, automatic removal of other anti-virus software and installation of the 2013 version was advertised very strongly on HSN. The automatic installation was one major reason that many people were interested in purchasing it. I heard that, according to buyers' phone calls to HSN.

I have just wasted a week, restoring my PC to previous times, 4 times and transferring my files (133GB) from a previous backup drive to my laptop. However, I had to first copy files from the laptop to USB drives to make room on the laptop. When that became too tedious (due to my large folders and files) I finally compressed my folders to make room for the backup files.

Then I was able to transfer the backup files to my laptop. The transfer utility takes hours. Finally, today, I had to completely restore my computer to its factory condition. Hoping against hope, before the final complete restoration, I tried to restore just Windows 7 without losing all my work, 3 times, to no avail!

After I completely restored my PC back to factory condition, I lost all my software (for my computer training services, web designing services, astrology services, etc.). I will now have to spend an unknown amount of time re-installing all of my software, devices, etc.

I am not alone with my complaint about Vipre 2013 either. You need to read other, numerous complaints about Vipre 2013 from users with results similar to or worse than my results. The complaints are on the HSN website related to your 2013 product. You ought to be banned from selling such a destructive and inferior product! Fortunately this product as all HSN products can be returned within 30 days.

I can understand your frustration but I don't see why you blame Vipre for the inability to uninstall another manufacturer's product, especially since you appear to be infected, or were at the time.

To fully disclose, I am a GFI reseller and I am a network security professional with over 30 years experience in the industry.  I am very familiar with the whole Vipre family, consumer, business and MSP (GFI MAX Remote) which includes a Vipre agent but labeled Managed Antivirus.

Vipre, as all antivirus apps, are not the best cleaners.  You should have disabled all AV apps and ran a good cleaner, like MalwareBytes, and you should have scanned for rootkits. Kasperski has a very good rootkit detector, as does Sysinternals called Rootkit Revealer (now owned by MSFT).

And, as all AV products will recommend, once infected, you should back up data, wipe the disk, reinstall the OS from a clean disk, reinstall apps and then restore data.  Yes, that seems like overkill and very people really do that but it is the ONLY way to be sure you are not still infected.  And, depending on the infection(s) you had, this may be a requirement.  There are recent infections that will overwrite a big portion of the OS and corrupt the registry.  No AV product will ever state it can recover from any data loss as it is not designed to do that.

AV products protect you from known malware and depending on the type of infection and what they target, can protect you in some instances from all malware, e.g. boot sector viruses.  Most infections today are not even viruses, nor are they worms, but some mass-mailing worms still do exist.  Most today are trojans, rootkits and spyware/hijackware,extortionware designed to cost you time and money.

I don't know what "IT trainer" implies to your level of knowledge with OSs, AV products, application support, troubleshooting and operating systems, as most IT trainers I'm aware of are generally specific to particular apps or certain parts of the IT industry, not with knowledge in a vast area as a support person, with years of experience, would have.  I don't mean that to imply you are not capable but from your own words, I suspect your level of expertise is limited in this situation.  I am giving you my professional opinion and in now mean to degrade your intelligence.  Ignorance has nothing to do with intelligence.

I am glad to hear your situation has improved but I'm not buying the RipOff you claim against GFI Vipre as I use it every day and have for years and find it to be the most reliable product, of the dozens I am familiar with, with the least overhead, least impact on a system and most compatible and where it needs to be excluded (as all do), it is easily customizable and support on the product is very good.

If you want to be hard on someone, I would look to the AV product you were using prior to Vipre and why it was so difficult to remove.  What you must know is that Vipre also offers "cleaners" created by other vendors, to remove their own products, because they often do not completely remove themselves.  McAfee and Norton/Symantec are the biggest offenders in this area.