Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Resident Goddess44
   Member

   Giveawayoftheday Forums
   5:11 PM 02/04/2015

   Hello,
   I installed Privacy Eraser Pro 3.5.4, when it ran on Mar 3-4 2015. Ive had no problem what so ever with the program since then.
   Yesterday, I awoke to this error message when I ran the program. "This App cant be run on your PC". Totally bazaar, since its been running several times daily on my PC!! I know there is no technical support, but for the company to just remove a program they agreed to giveaway, and to register for 1 year is just plain wrong, and doesnt speak highly of the company. I tried everything in the world to get it to run. The program's icon is gone from my desktop, leaving the missing program icon, but shows as installed on Control Panel-Programs, and in the Task Manager, and every other program I have that lists installed programs. I disabled Antispyware and Antivirus programs. I am thourally perplexed here, and tried to re-install it yesterday, but of course got the message its no longer available.

   Since I downloaded and registered the program within the allotted time, I want to ask if I could possibly re-install it ?
   Screen shots included:
   1. Date and time program down loaded: http://imgur.com/okQguCe
   2. Date and time installed with Total Uninstall program, and registry records: http://imgur.com/K0Mf97c
   3. Error message I receive now: http://imgur.com/8k8A42H
   4. Program listed as trusted in SecureAPlus Antivirus: http://imgur.com/sjvnQyt.
   I have one more PC that I plan to buy this program for. Now, this disappearing thing makes me quite leery. I mean an $80 program that just disappears??? What if I'd paid for it, you know?

   TIA,
   Resident Goddess.

   Posted 9 years ago #
2. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   From what you say the program itself didn't disappear. It's still shown as installed in the Control Panel but you've lost the icon and some stuff that's required to run the program. Did you run a registry cleaner or some anti-malware/spyware program?

   If yes, add the entries back if you saved them. If not (or you don't have the entries), make a full system backup, so you can get back to where you are now if necessary, and then do a System Restore to a recovery point before you lost the program. Note that you'll lose any programs installed after the recovery point.

   And no, you can't reinstall the software. It can only be installed on the day of the giveaway. However, you might be able to install the trialware version (if there is one) on top of the old version and get it to work. Again, backup before you try.

   FWIW - if you'd paid for the program then you could reinstall it at your leisure, plus you'd get tech support and updates.

   Posted 9 years ago #
3. 

   Resident Goddess44
   Member

   The program [[DID]] appear, icon and all, and was running just fine, for about 3 weeks. Then the next day, I got that error message, when I clicked to open the program as usual. Nothing to add back. No registry cleaner or anti-spyware programs were used.

   I realize that if I paid for the program, Id have tech support and updates,(MAYBE). However being able to try, evaluate and recommend the program, in trade for 6 months to a year, registered free trial is supposed to be the advantage of participating in GOTD, besides the feedback we give to the developer, as long as we follow the simple rules. Its really crappy when I downloaded and installed on the day of the give away, which I've proved, and then one day I just don't have the program anymore. Yes, I could just bypass GOTD, and just buy the program outright, but I never buy without a trial first. No trial, no buy. Freeware seems to be a GOTD ideal.

   I say (maybe) above re paid for programs, because I paid for several programs from IObit, after GOTD giveaways, and one in particular, Driver Booster put a bad driver on my computer and I couldn't boot it anymore, after restarting. My Restore Point was useless. I had a Black Screen and couldn't even get into Safe Mode. I got no help from IObit at all, and my money was not refunded. They changed the date of an Intel driver to look like it was a new driver, when in fact it was an old driver. I called Intel to double check with them, because the date of the driver was highlighted, and I knew there had not been an update for a few years, as I check myself every now and then. IObit falsely claimed that the Driver I already had installed was in "very bad condition", and I must update with this new version of the driver. What was interesting is that the other two driver programs I had installed, had no complaints about that particular driver. I had used Driver Booster before, so I went ahead and updated my Divers. I was without that brand new $1500.00 Dell i7 computer for 4 weeks while I researched, paid for, and downloaded a slew of Recovery Repair programs on this little computer, to locate, copy and make the partition active again. Expensive, but not as expensive as a repair tech, or a new computer would have been. So FWIW, sometimes paid is not a guarantee of support, good updates and reinstalls.

   Yes you are correct. The program didn't disappear. Just realizing. Sorry, poor choice of words. It quit working and unregistered itself. The only suspect AV program that could have possibly interfered would have been the newly installed SecureAPlus Cloud AV, but Cybertron is listed as a trusted application, and its certificates are valid according to SecureAPlus. Oddly enough, its only the Privacy Eraser64 that has lost its live program icon. The 86 version is fine in the Program Files folder.

   Posted 9 years ago #
4. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   Other suggestions:

   - Look in your Recycle Bin in case something was accidentally deleted.

   - It might have something to do with "Total Uninstall" if you used it to uninstall a program between the "program was working, now it's not" phase. Total Uninstall "takes a snapshot" of your system when you install and then returns the system to that state when you uninstall. It's similar to a "system restore" and has the same problem... the restoration can cause problems for stuff installed after that "snapshot" was taken. Suppose you installed Program "A" and it set a flag to "1", then you installed Program "B" and it set the flag to "2", you then installed Privacy Eraser Pro and it set the flag to "3". When you run Total Uninstall to remove Program "A" the flag will be reset to "1" and Privacy Eraser Pro is looking for a value of at least "3".

   The good news is that Total Uninstall is supposed to keep the files necessary to reinstall a program. So, if you did Total Uninstall a program just before your trouble started then you might Total (un)Uninstall it.

   - Use whatever hard drive utility you use and take a gander at the "reallocated sector count" and, since it's a newish PC, the temperature in the SMART data. If your system starts acting strangely then it could be an early sign of a pending drive failure. Hard drives typically have a "bathtub" failure curve; lots of early failures, followed by a long period of few failures, then lots of failures at the end of life.

   - Lastly, it might have something to do with your Profile. Your PC may have decided that you no longer have sufficient rights to run the program. Try creating a new Profile with administrator rights and see if that works.

   But, at the end of the day, I rather doubt that the folks behind Privacy Eraser unactivated the program. There's no profit in it for them since 99.9% of the people impacted would, quite naturally, react by saying "those lousy so and so's, I'll never buy a product from them". Plus, word that they're not a reputable company would spread to those that didn't install the program and their business would ultimately fail. They put their product on GOTD to generate sales, not to create a mob with virtual pitchforks.

   Posted 9 years ago #
5. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   One other, other thought...

   Have you compared the registry entries captured by Total Uninstaller with your current registry? It could be that all you need to do is install the program on another 64-bit PC and then copy any missing files to the problem PC.

   Posted 9 years ago #
6. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   The message: "This App cant be run on your PC" is apparently a generic Windows error message, so IMHO probably not any help.

   The shortcut on your desktop for Privacy Eraser is still there, & probably still functional in the sense that it likely still points to the .exe file that you'd run to start Privacy Eraser, BUT, it may be that that .exe file is no longer there. Normally the picture you'd see on the shortcut, the icon, is inside the .exe file, so if that file were missing, that picture would be missing as well. The obvious questions then might be is that file truly missing, & if so, where did it go?

   If you right click a shortcut & select properties, if you view the Shortcut tab you should see a path -- at least on win7 where I am at the moment. An example from my desktop is "C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\PowerDVD14\PDVDLP.exe". For that particular shortcut the relevant .exe file would be PDVDLP.exe -- everything up to that would be the path, describing the directory tree structure where it was stored on the hard drive. At any rate if you look at the shortcut's properties you should be able to determine the name of the .exe file & where it should be located.

   You could check to see if that file still exists on your hard drive(s) by checking the folder where it should be, or searching using the .exe file's name. It could be that it got moved somehow, or it might be in the security software's quarantine folder etc. You could check your security software &/or it's logs to see if it did something with or to that .exe file.

   If the file is indeed missing, you might be able to get a copy from a prior backup if you have one. The .exe file in a trial version of the software may be the same, but I'd caution against running the normal install routine because that may invalidate your license activations/registration -- running it on another PC should work, or maybe do a full backup 1st that you could restore [after saving the program's folder elsewhere, e.g. on a USB stick] before running a trial install, or maybe hunt up a copy of universal extractor & see if it works on the trial setup program file.

   If the .exe file hasn't been moved & it is not missing, it could have been altered or damaged. A hard drive problem could cause that, & so could an infection by malware. Hard drive manufacturers usually offer software tools &/or advice on checking their hard drive's functioning. If malware's suspected, you'd want to download software tools from the sites of companies that make security software, e.g. Kaspersky, because if malware altered the Privacy Eraser file(s), it most likely already compromised your installed security software. [Malware can go to very great lengths to avoid detection, including disabling software that might detect it, but it does that in ways so that you probably won't see any change or difference.]

   Posted 9 years ago #

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