OK, so I’m doing a bunch of updates on the laptop that Mr. S normally uses because (1) I’m planning on using it myself now and then over the next few months and (2) he’s notoriously bad about keeping the thing updated himself. Antivirus updates, defrag, Ad-Aware, Spybot, etc. Hm, better grab the latest program versions while I’m at it. Ad-Aware is up to v. 2007, cool.
Whoops, it keeps disconnecting when I try to update the definitions, and seems to hang when I try to do an actual scan. Off to the Lavasoft user/support forums.
WHOA!! Lots of unhappy people. At least one guy’s computer turned to toast. Techs being very nice, asking for details, promising to look into the problems. But this doesn’t look good. One user suggests that this version could be the end of Lavasoft.
Or have I just happened to catch the upgrade in the very early stages, and all this debugging/complaining is normal at this point?
These days the usual security software drill is firewall, AV, Ad-Aware, Spybot. Are we going to have to change that?
(Mods, feel free to move this at will. I’m not really asking a specific question, I guess, but it seems like a factual topic. I’ve ininstalled 2007 and gone back to the previous version – the one that WORKED – so I don’t really have a problem to be solved.)
While I am not that familiar with this specific beta (I use their software but don’t keep up with the upgrades that closely), I can chime in a little bit about software.
Betas are not intended to be released software. Yet, they are given the once-over but they are not intended to be used by novices, or people who have sensitive data, or by people for whom a Windows reinstall is an insurmountable obstacle (though of course we do not want it to go that far). Anyone deciding a purchase decision on an initial beta is not getting the full picture.
Some companies have rather abused the idea of beta so that people think “beta” means “release-ready software I can get faster” and don’t realize that they are, in fact, guinea pigs.
Whenever you release software into the world there is a risk involved. Our house is much smaller so there is the problem of money; we can only duplicate so much hardware, only have so many testers, etc. We even hide our betas with a huge disclaimer, but we still get people who basically want to complain, even though it’s a free version of a paid program.
On the flip side are the good beta testers - people who give meaningful feedback both positive and negative, and who include information to replicate negative results. People screaming that a product sucks (with lots of exclamation points but little else) don’t help and shouldn’t beta test.
Ad-Aware 2007 is out of beta to my knowledge (at least that’s what I understood when I downloaded it and installed it :eek: ). It hasn’t done anything horrible to my system (yet), but it does seem a lot slower particularly for a full scan than the previous version. I haven’t had it hang on me.
OK, yes, I misspoke in my rush to finish the post before heading out the door . . . This is not a beta, it’s the final release. But it still seems like there are a lot of complaints, more than usual for new software versions . . . more of the same at download.com.