Reimage Software Reviews Is It Safe Mac
Reimage 2020 license key is set to improve the operations and function of the software. Most antivirus software come in after the damage only to eliminate the virus. Now the software not only eliminate the virus but is able to take care of the damage. Also important is the ability to replace even damage folders. Reimage Repair is a sophisticated and advanced piece of software, packed with many helpful features. To determine problems, security software first performs a detailed system scan, looking for damaged or missing system files, such as.dlls or corrupt registries.
Utilities
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Pros
- Unique repair service reinstalls Windows 'in place' by restoring or replacing missing or damaged Windows files.
- Only software of its kind.
Cons
- Only repairs files that are part of the Windows OS, not Microsoft Office or other third-party files.
- Can turn up disturbing (but ultimately harmless) glitches.
Bottom Line
Reimage is the only repair-in-place Windows repair service, but at $69.95 per year, you should try other solutions first.
Reimage is a unique
License and Guarantee
If your great-uncle's system is acting up and you can't figure out why, then you might want to tell him to visit Reimage.com and spend $69.95 for a license that would let him use the Reimage service for one year on one computer only—and then you should coach him through the process of downloading and running the utility that sets the repair process in motion. Reimage promises a money-back guarantee if its service doesn't repair Windows, but you might want to stay on the phone with your great-uncle to help him navigate any glitches of the kind I encountered, and you might want to think twice before spending that sum on your own system.
Test Results
I got mixed results when I tested Reimage on three real-world systems. It eventually performed as advertised, but it gave me a series of headaches while it did. (Read on for the details.) After Reimage was done performing its repairs, I was slightly dismayed to find that it had put back on my Start Menu all the useless links that I had carefully removed when I first installed Windows, and which I now had to spend a lot of time removing once again.
To avoid disappointment before using Reimage, it helps to be clear on exactly what it does. When you launch its free scanner—after downloading it from its website—it performs a quick virus-scan on your system, tests for problems in the Windows registry, and checks for missing or damaged Windows files. It also reports on the brand name of your motherboard and video card and other information that it doesn't seem to use for any purpose. It also reads Windows' crash logs and reports obvious problems, like too little available disk space—something that Windows warns you about anyway—and whether it thinks you're running Windows on too little memory. This initial scan takes about five minutes or less. If Windows's crash logs indicate that the problems you're having are with software that Reimage can't repair, the program will tell you, so you won't waste time and money asking it to repair something it can't fix. At the end of the free scan, if Reimage finds problems that it thinks it can repair, it prompts you to pay your $69.95 for a license key that unlocks the program's repair phase.
Some of the information in Reimage's initial no-charge report suggested that the program had figured out more details that it really had. For example, on the best-maintained of my three test systems, Reimage reported that my third-party backup software had crashed recently, but that the problem was 'repairable in most cases' by repairing built-in Windows components. In fact, there was nothing wrong with my backup software. The software crash that Reimage had detected had occurred when I deliberately terminated the backup software because it had encountered a physical problem in a backup disk—and so any attempt to 'repair' the surrounding Windows components would have been a waste of time and money. Fortunately, after testing this system, Reimage told me that it hadn't found any serious problems, and that if the system was having problems that Reimage hadn't detected, I could tell it to go ahead and repair the system anyway, with a money-back guarantee if the repair didn't work. I skipped the repair on that system.
Down-dating
On two other systems—real-world systems that had been heavily used for more than a year by members of my family—Reimage found other crashes that probably had nothing to do with operating system-level problems, such as Firefox crashes that had probably been fixed by Firefox updates. On those systems, Reimage suggested that I use it to repair my system, and I let it proceed to do so. The whole process took between 30 minutes and an hour (on those tries when it completed successfully), and required two or three reboots to allow Reimage to modify files that are in use when Windows is running normally.
It was during those repair processes that my headaches began. On a Windows 7 system, Reimage downloaded more than 400 replacement Windows files, and restored a batch of Start Menu items that I had carefully removed. When Reimage was finished, Windows Update re-downloaded about 40 updates that I had installed earlier, because—as a Reimage representative explained—Reimage's database of Windows files needs some time to catch up with Windows updates, so Reimage may actually 'down-date' your most recent updates. This undoing and redoing of my most recent updates didn't seem to cause any harm, but I wasn't entirely happy about it, because I had no way of knowing whether the 'down-dated' files would work correctly with third-party software that I started to use before Windows Update gets a chance to update my system again. Remember that Windows Update updates your Microsoft Office and other Microsoft application software—but Reimage only works with operating system files, so it's at least possible for a mismatch to occur after Reimage replaces new operating system files with older ones. It's also unclear how many of the hundreds of 'replaced' files were actually 'down-dates' that Windows immediately un-replaced by updating them to the current versions.
Reimage doesn't make it easy to figure out exactly what it did during a repair. It lets you click a link in the program window to display a list of files that it replaced or restored, but it doesn't tell you which files replaced ones already on disk, and which ones were newly downloaded to your system—perhaps putting back files that you had deliberately removed. Also, the window that displays the list doesn't let you search it or save it to any standard document format. The window also lacks a menu from which you can print out the list, but expert users will remember that Ctrl-P brings up a print menu in any Windows application, a key-combination that also works here. If you're really expert, you can find the XML file that Reimage uses to display the list of replaced files, and open it in some other program that lets you search the list, but you'll have to figure out how to do this by yourself.
More Caveats
My worst headaches occurred with a heavily-used Windows XP system that I used for testing. Reimage started up smoothly enough, then told me that I had to restart in Safe Mode to continue the repair—and gave me a button to press to perform the restart. I understood that Reimage needed to modify files that it couldn't modify when Windows was running normally, so I pushed the button to restart. Unfortunately, when the machine rebooted in Safe Mode, Reimage automatically launched itself, ran for a few seconds, and then crashed and disappeared from the screen. If I were testing my working system—or if my great-uncle were using the program—this would be very worrying, but it didn't inspire confidence even when working with a test system.
The same problem kept happening repeatedly until I got in touch with a Reimage representative, who told me that I should 1) turn off my anti-virus before running Reimage, and 2) ignore the warning to restart in Safe Mode. So I did as I was told, and this time Reimage was able to continue, though I didn't like the idea of turning off anti-virus protection while my computer was connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, Reimage needs to be connected to the Internet in order to consult its database of Windows files; you can't use it without a connection. That means, of course, that it can't restore a system with a broken network driver that prevents you from accessing the Internet at all—a fairly common problem.
Even with a working Internet connection I found that Reimage's server isn't 100 percent reliable. At one point in my testing, when Reimage started up, it ran for a minute or two then stopped—and its window displayed the same error message that Internet Explorer shows when it can't find a remote site. Apparently, Reimage's server was down, and so the program couldn't connect with it—but it didn't display an error message explaining the problem, only the standard Internet Explorer 'site not found' message. If this had been my main system, I would have been very worried at this point.
I tried running Reimage again a few times over the next hour, but the problem persisted, so I gave up and went to sleep. The next morning, I started the program again, and this time the Reimage server was working, and it continued its repairs to the end. Once again, I had to wait while Windows Update downloaded updates to a few dozen files that Reimage had 'down-dated,' and once again, I spent some time undoing the changes that Reimage had made to my Start Menu, but the process completed successfully, and Reimage told me that it had restored or replaced hundreds of Windows files.
A Reimage representative told me that a recent change in Symantec Antivirus had probably caused the initial problems with Safe Mode and system crashes, and that the normal procedure with this kind of problem is to set up a remote session to the user's machine so the company's technical support team can run the software for the user. Another safety net is a built-in Undo feature that's available when you uninstall the software, and which you are obliged to use if you ask for a refund. I didn't experiment with the Undo feature, but if you plan to use it: Use it as soon as possible after running a Reimage repair, because anything that mixes file versions on your system is inherently risky.
Is Reimage Pc Repair Safe
The Only Software for the Job (Literally)
I wish I could give a clear yes or no recommendation about Reimage, but I can't. I'm willing to believe that I had some exceptional bad luck with it, and even with that bad luck, Reimage eventually completed its job. I don't know of any other software that even attempts those tasks. If non-technical friends or relatives are having recalcitrant problems with a Windows system, I think I might recommend that they spend $69.95 on a Reimage license, as an alternative to suggesting that they reinstall Windows and all their applications from scratch—something that they may not know how to do anyway. No other software even tries to rebuild a broken Windows system without requiring you to reinstall your applications—and if that's the task you want to perform, then Reimage is the only choice. Just keep the aspirin handy.
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