Just over a year ago MVPs were offered a free subscription to the NOD virus-checker application.

The aim of this was no doubt the usual one of getting a product in use by MVPs so that that fact (visibility at demos; "which virus checker are you using") would influence other people to install it too.

There are plenty of free offers open to everyone for limited periods of virus-checker support and so many MVPs including myself thought that this *special* offer might need the MVP in a year to once again prove that he/she still was an MVP, but otherwise the virus checker offer would continue to be in operation.

Well it wasn't. After a year the name/password received no longer worked and no updates came for the software. In the case of normal software that wouldn't matter over-much but in the case of virus software it does, so off I went to look for one of the other free offers - this time the ones for the general public.

Microsoft have a link to a page with all companies providing such a thing and the first snag is that they have "improved" that page so that it no longer says "XXX offers a 3 month free subscription" so you can see at a glance which company offers the longest free subscription but now only has company logos.

Anyway I hadn't used Panda before so I set up a new hotmail address for it and applied and got the free subscription and installed it (and it works). It's for three months.

Only evey day I now get a a message telling me that I still haven't configured the updates (and that it will "shortly cease to update itself").

This is like a Russian doll because if you try to configure the updates, it says you need to register first and if you try to register it won't let you saying that you have specified the wrong application code.

So you check the registration page and there is no place where you can enter an activation code ! So you click on "what is an application code" and it tells you (at the end) that it's something you don't get with a trial version of the product.

So Panda are daily telling me to configure my updates even though they know full well that this is a trial product which I thus can't register and which I thus can't specify updates for.

The next question is what this "will shortly cease to update" means.

Is this a free 3 month trial or not? If it stops updating after a month say, it's a one month's trial in my book.

Time therefore to hate Panda and start checking through the possibilities on the MS page to see which offers the longest free protection. Luckily provided I don't use the same company again, I already have a hotmail address lined up just for it.

 

P.S. I've now dropped Panda. A week of having pop-ups arriving on an *hourly* basis (yes, even when you said later and got rid of the pop-up it still came back (often) in the same computer session) telling me to specify my upgrade settings (which they ten - see above - wouldn't let me do) was enough. No doubt this is supposed to "encourage" you to pay - me it just made completely MAD at Panda and never want to have anything to do with them again.
We'll see how Kapersky Labs are. There was a good start. They only wanted my e-mail address. Panda wanted full and valid postal address ... The snag is that Kapersky Labs like more of the rest of the free trials is for 30 days only. I'll have to dig out the offer for company employees' home machines even though it is McAfee ....