WinPatrol.com down

Digerati · February 16, 2018, 04:25:14 PM

He might try the American Red Cross Safe & Well site, available through the Texas Hurricane Center webpage (link on right side).

hayc59 · February 16, 2018, 08:05:03 PM

plodr, wow that was good under cover work...and a real injustice to her and the family
if this is the true Bret Lowry family our hearts and prayers to you all

Quote from: Corrine on February 16, 2018, 02:11:28 AM
As it turns out, I heard from Bret just a few minutes ago and the unfortunate thing is that Hurricane Irma hit them very hard and they are down to a skeleton crew. Bret assured me that the servers will remain running.

C was that his relations??

Digerati · February 16, 2018, 09:29:53 PM

According to the article, it was his mother. :(

plodr · February 17, 2018, 05:55:01 PM

Thanks Bill.
I'm not so sure that they'd know to do this:

QuoteRegister Yourself as "Safe and Well"
Click on the "List Myself as Safe and Well" button to register yourself on the site.

These people are in their mid 80's and might have never had a computer and/or smart phone.
Their phone number hasn't changed and goes unanswered.

Digerati · February 17, 2018, 07:10:43 PM

If that old, and assuming they are still alive and well, I can only assume they relocated to some assisted living facility.

If your husband is that concerned, he should call the local sheriff's office. I am sure they can point him in the right direction to at least learn of their fate. I would not expect the sheriff's office will divulge any private/personal information, but your husband should be able to find out if they survived the storm.

plodr · February 18, 2018, 03:03:47 PM

It is not my husband who "knows" these people. It is for an 86 year old friend of ours.
My husband found an alternate address 7 miles away from their old address. (We have no idea if they moved to a new place or moved in with family members.) We told the concerned couple to send a card or note to the address my husband was able to unearth because obviously we don't have a working phone number for the couple in Texas.

deleted3510 · February 28, 2019, 03:51:31 PM

I visited winpatrol.com to see if there were any new program updates and, once again, there are no updates but there is an expired certificate. Exactly the same as last year. On top of this, I have approximately 5 unanswered emails.

This guy is not taking care of business like he should. What a waste of, once was, a great product.

Corrine · February 28, 2019, 03:59:31 PM

It is sad. When Bill retired, I hoped that Bret would continue but it doesn't appear that is to be. :(

Digerati · February 28, 2019, 04:51:15 PM

I think what bothers me most is the total silence.

If development and support has come to an end, why not post a quick comment about that on the website?

From my understanding, while Bret carried the vast majority of the workload, it was not totally a 1-man show. It seems to me, if Bret is no longer able, for what ever reason, someone could post a "Going out of business" sign on the site. :(

I sincerely hope this is all by choice and not due to some health or other tragic issue. But even 1-man (or 1-woman) operations should have an emergency contingency plan - especially when customers and paying clients are involved.

I am still running WP+ on my main systems because it is of value to me to be notified when some new startup tries to implant itself on my systems. But I do worry, with this apparent extended period of no updates, that Scotty is just giving me a false sense of security. :(

pastywhitegurl · April 24, 2019, 02:37:55 PM

I still run WP for that same reason. Does anyone have any updates? I'm starting to wonder if WP is safe to continue running without anyone taking care of the back end.

I think I will stop buying lifetime licenses for anything. It seems whenever I do, the product dies a couple years later. The only viable one left I have is MBAM.

Former lifetime member of :
Cheeselovers International
Pearl Crescent page saver
(and likely others that I have long forgotten!)

Digerati · April 24, 2019, 02:57:31 PM

QuoteI think I will stop buying lifetime licenses for anything. It seems whenever I do, the product dies a couple years later. The only viable one left I have is MBAM.

Former lifetime member of :
Cheeselovers International
Pearl Crescent page saver
(and likely others that I have long forgotten!)

LOL Yeah, I have a few too. I had one for the eXtreme PSU calculator but they made that free for everyone. Then my Splash ID password manager that used to sync up with my Palm PDA. But they pulled the lifetime license when they dropped Palm support for Android phones. I also had a lifetime license for WinZip way back when it was DOS based. But they pulled that when WinZip for Windows came out. I was happy to see Malwarebytes continued to honor theirs when they went from Malwarebytes Antimalware (MBAM 2.x) to Malwarebytes (3.x).

I don't remember how, but I got a free lifetime license many years ago for SUPERAntiSpyware that is still valid.

Corrine · April 24, 2019, 03:17:48 PM

If you navigate to winpatrol.com, you'll get the "The certificate expired on Wednesday, February 13, 2019 9:07 PM." message. As far as I know, the last version updates for the three products appear to have been in 2017. Bret hasn't been active in Twitter or Facebook although he apparently attended some sort of engineering event in October, 2018.

winchester73 · April 24, 2019, 03:35:42 PM

Quote from: pastywhitegurl on April 24, 2019, 02:37:55 PM
I'm starting to wonder if WP is safe to continue running without anyone taking care of the back end.

I can't think of a reason that it isn't OK to keep using WinPatrol.

pastywhitegurl · April 25, 2019, 04:30:56 AM

Thanks for that. I do like that it notifies me when some program stops or is being installed.

plodr · April 25, 2019, 12:57:16 PM

I still have an extremely old version on our 4 Windows 7 computers. I changed something on my husband's desktop computer and it alerted me that a change had been made to some startup item so it is "monitoring".