Download this Program We Built to Fix our Program?
Happy New Year! Marketing Technology finds and reports on the latest technology that will enable your business to effectively market to your audience, for acquisition or retention strategies. Subscribe now the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You'll also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
Our clients utilize PCAnywhere for their support issues. I’m running Vista - so when I tried to load our licensed client, I was swiftly met with an incompatibility message and the installer quit.
In visiting the Symantec site, they of course fixed the compatibility issue with an upgrade to version 12.1. The snag? You have to pay $100 for the upgrade. I have to have it, so I paid the $100. Paying $100 for an application to simply work after you paid the initial licensing before is really enough to make you angry.
Now that I have 12.1 loaded up, I’m having tons of problems with it. The app appears to be running if I look in Task Manager, but the window is nowhere to be found. And if I do get the window up, it’s totally blank. I started researching the issue in the Symantec forums. One note I found was a great article on the Symantec Autofix program.
What kind of software company writes a program that fixes issues that affect their original program? I guess Symantec would be that company.
Hey Symantec: If you know what the problem is and how to fix it, put the fix in your original application!!!
After installing the Autofix program, PCAnywhere still continues to have issues. I cringe when I have to use any Symantec program… I’ve been writing about them for too long.
- Launch sessioncontroller.exe - you will find this in the program install directory.
- wait a few seconds
- then double click and launch pcAnywhere (winaw32.exe)
The blank screen is due to pcanywhere timing out waiting for sessioncontroller.exe to launch.
This has been fixed in 12.5 - currently in Beta at http://betanew.altiris.com/BetaProducts/PCAnywhere125Enterprise/tabid/148/Default.aspx
-abhijit
Back to my original gripe… why should I have to pay extra to acquire what should, at the very least, have been a patch released to users of 12.1, nevermind 12.0 (which didn’t work on Vista)?