Kaspersky Drops The Ball, But McAfee Comes to The Rescue

As I have written here before, I hosted a Windows 7 Ultimate Launch party, and for the party there were a couple of offers for software that was a kick-start to getting people purchase other software, to go along with Windows 7.

The biggies on the list were deals on Norton Internet Security and Kaspersky Antivirus. Though I had planned to pass out the post card sized flyers to the people during the celebration, that never happened, as other things intervened, and the stacks of the flyers got left on a table.

A few days ago, I realized I had not given the flyers out and tried to download the 1 year trial of the AV product, so that I was sure that I would not be wasting my time to call, or otherwise notify, the party attendees that they could get the software free before November 30.

When I got to the site, I entered the information, and was told that all the copies of the product had already been downloaded. I knew this was bogus because only my son and I had ever seen the URL to go to, to claim the software.

I contacted the company through their site, and was given a case number with some truly unhelpful choices to pick from, to categorize the problem. Now I am the very first to know that there will never be a category that catches every problem, and if there was, the page would be the kind that scrolls forever. However, a simple box for Other, would have been nice.

Two days later I got some lame form letter with instructions to do something I could not do, as I have no serial number to begin with, so retrieving it would be difficult. I did try however, thinking that there might be a communication problem relating to the written form of the English language, but no, I was told since I had no serial number in the first place, there was nothing to retrieve.

Another contact, and this time nothing, no contact in return. I wonder how many other house party participants had this problem? It certainly would not surprise me. Also, it does not make me very favorably inclined toward their products in the future. I have no problem with not getting things free, but if you, as an individual, or you, as a company, invite me to receive something gratis, I damn well better get it.

Kaspersky Labs is on the SHorT list.

Fortunately, the nice people at McAfee have an offer that is better than what Kaspersky was offering. It is available to everyone (you need not have attended a Windows 7 Launch Party) and it covers 3 machines! Yippee!

The URL is here, enjoy and be wary of offers from strangers named Kaspersky!

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