BT NetProtectPlus – Nightmare

I have finally made the plunge and changed Broadband supplier as my existing supplier put up its prices by £5 a month, and moved to BT broadband. The move went fine, (well so far anyway). It happened when they said it would, and the wireless router was delivered on the same day preconfigured. Just plug it in, the broadband worked first time. Amazing. A little while later the laptop was talking to the router, and email back up and running again. Great
I then tried installing BT Net Protect on the small old vista laptop. It first required that I remove all the security I had on the machine then two hours later, as it is such a large download file I got it installed. So I next tried to install it on my more powerful windows 7 desktop. It would not install. It just came up with the message sorry install failed please try again. Now this would not matter if the file was relatively quick to download, but even with my 8 Mbs link it still took between 20 to 60 minutes to download each time. (For security the program forced a new download every time). So after a wasted the evening I gave up reinstalled what I had previously and left it.

A couple of days later BT sent me a helpful email reminder saying that now I had the broadband up and working, I should install NetProtectPlus and if I was having any problems gave a phone number with a real person person to speak to. So like a fool I uninstalled all the program that clashed with the NetProtectPlus, download it again and tried to install it again. It failed so phoned up help and support. Now for the last 16 years I have worked either as part of a IT support desk or been responsible for one so I know a little about IT support and this was a prime example of how not to do it. The very polite lady took no notice of what I said and proceeded just to try and reinstall the software, even though I had told he it had just failed. She was evidently working from a check list. After it failed for her she passed me over to a level 2 support lady. Again very polite but working from a check list, though she did have an interesting set of reasons as to why it did not work – Incomparable with IE9, did not like the Java I had installed, the same for the pdf reader – it was not Adobe; and the wireless router was at fault; the speed of the broadband was too slow etc etc After three hours she came up with the idea that I had a virus on the machine. Well I told her this was not likely as I had scanned it before staring the process, if there was one it would have come from her machine. Still she insisted that this was the reason and proceed to reinstall one of the rival supplier programs I had removed to scan the machine. Well of course there was no virus. So after 4 hours on the phone to India it was escalated to the next level of support

A couple of days later after several emails and attempted phone calls contact with level 3 support is finally made. The person here seemed to largely want to repeat what the previous person had done, and when I pointed this out they almost stopped communicating with me. Three hours later it did not work. As this person was not really communicating with me except when I was needed to reboot my machine or log on to the BT site to get the download , I was using my old trusty laptop. It was now not working very well, and crashed giving the blue screen of death. The first time probably in 3 years. On further investigation I found that NetProtectPlus was using twice as much resources as anything else on the machine, making it almost unusable- so it has been removed and my previous protection put back on. A brief review for the BT forum website on NetProtectPlus has page after page of complaints about it. A few can be found here http://community.bt.com/t5/Other-BB-Queries/problems-downloading-Bt-netprotect-plus/td-p/32240 It has comments from users who are even having problems getting it to work on brand new machines. After 7 hours on support calls and 2 hours trying to do the install myself I have given up with NetProtectPlus, and put my old protection back. It may work well in a cabled environment but it does not seem to work in a nornal home environment.

A shame really otherwise the process had gone very well – just avoid NetProtectPlus until it is improved.