Customer Reviews

Perfect Image Professional

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I Purchased 'Perfect Image'on August 2, 2008 (Order# 1019051984). Product received Saturday August 30, 2008. Four weeks to deliver; not a good start.
After installing the product on my office computer, the CD drive wouldn't read discs. Error was "incorrect media". I tried using a USB DVD/CD, with the same results. I uninstalled the software, and the devices were once again usable.
I thought I would give the product another try on my laptop computer. Product loaded ok, and when I backed up my laptop, 'Perfect Image' indicated to log off and reboot for the changes to be effective.
That is when the lap top completly failed....on boot I get "Operating System not found" My laptop is totally wasted...wont boot from any MBR order, and like my office computer, the CD drive is "inop", as apperently is the HD.
Changing boot order, etc to no avail. It is extremely fortunate that I did not shut my office computer down before removing uninstalling 'Perfect Image', or I would have trashed it as well.
This is the worst software I have ever used, and I have been doing this for nearly 40 years. I am a EE with a Masters in computer Science, and have never encountered such a poor product, It obviously has serious compatibility issues.

Does not support Vista 64-bit. I bought this at a retail store and the box says supports windows vista. I get the product home only to find out it does not support 64-bit vistas which is not on the box any where. Also if you need support over the phone its 24.95 the first 10 minutes and then a certain dollar amount for every minute after that. Doesn't look like a very good company.

First off, the product page makes no mention of the version number: the version of Avanquest Perfect Image on sale here is 11 and Avanquest Perfect Image 11 is NOT compatible with Windows Vista 64-bit! This review is on the Avanquest Perfect Image 11 - if you're a Windows XP or a Vista 32-bit user, read on.

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When I saw the average user rating for Perfect Image 11, I navigated away from its product page faster than I was able hit the Back button on my browser. I discovered, however, that the ratings for the alternative products such as Acronis True Image, Paragon Drive Backup, Powerquest Drive Image, and Norton Ghost were less than stellar as well. I decided to give Perfect Image a whirl - and I'm glad I did.

Perfect Image does a superb job of making a clone (image) of your entire hard drive!


Hard Drive Image
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For making an image (clone) of your hard drive, there's no need to install Perfect Image. Simply boot up with the CD into a GUI interface. The GUI isn't as pretty as Vista (or even XP), but it gets the job done.

Here's the *caveat*:
There's NO surefire way to acertain that Perfect Image has successfully made an image of a hard drive other than to TEST the image by performing a restore of the image and verifying that the restored hard drive does in fact work (-1 Star).

In my experience, Perfect Image is fairly reliable for making an image of a hard drive but it does occasionally fail to produce a working/restorable hard drive image - so, test, test, test to make sure you've successfully produced a working image of your hard drive. (Occasionally, when doing a restore, you might get a message saying that the PFM file isn't found. Simply select Generate and Save from the list of options).

You can save your hard drive images onto CD's, DVD's, flashdrives, or external hard drives.

With Perfect Image, formating your hard drive and reinstalling all your applications from scratch (sound familiar?) is a thing of the past.

Backup
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If you plan on selectively backing up files on your computer, Perfect Image seems to be plagued with a multitude of problems from an excruciatingly slow backup process to incompatibilities with OSes to the application failing to load up altogether (-1 Star). If that's what you plan on using Perfect Image for, I'd recommend FolderMatch instead.

Conclusion
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It all depends on what you use Perfect Image for. Perfect Image is pretty darn near perfect for making images of your hard drive. But for selective backups, I'd recommend FolderMatch.

I wish I would've checked out Acronis TrueImage before I bought Perfect Image. This software is very so-so, and not anywhere near as simple and convenient compared to TrueImage. Furthermore, the boot/recovery program whether from CD or hard drive, fails to work 50% of the time whether from not booting or not recognizing your hard drives. The boot program for True Image is slicker and much more polished and is nearly the same as the Windows version (done in a nice Vista style) whereas Perfect Image gives you a clunkier and less polished UI when booting directly to it.

A major irritant is the product validation which runs every time and will render the software useless if there is any problem or computer hardware upgrade. Your only option is to contact Avanquest and they will get around to responding to you. You are forced to request them to update their validation database so you can run 'your' program which is currently disabled. This process is quick, only 2 or 3 days to get it resolved.

One major advantage of Acronis TrueImage is that you can restore files, folders, all you want from the same backup image. You just can't do that with PerfectImage. So on that feature alone, why pay the same amount for less? Duh!

good product.i purchased it for its cloning ability.the only thing is when
i clone my hard drive with my external drive the software unlables my external drive and i have to go to computer management to relable.not a big deal.

Horrible program! The interface is all in super geek engineer TERMINOLOGY. I have NO IDEA what I'm doing or what anything means. The 'help' files are pathetic - also in 'engineer-eeze' so they are worthless. Can't find any help for error messages.
Wouldn't matter anyway because I wouldn't have a clue what they're talking about.
Want to guess your way through an important task like backing up a hard drive? Except you won't know if your doing that or one of several other flavors of backup operations. The program offers some different types of backups. I still have no idea which one I should be using, or what the difference is. Now the program is calling my hard disks "invalid". Windows says they are 'healthy' and they work JUST FINE. But I can't back them up because there is NO CLUE about what "invalid" means or what to do about it. $50 and lots of time down the toilet.

I realize that my review is not about this product, but I think it is relevant to potential purchasers of Avanquest products. I do not know anything about this particular program, but have had considerable difficulty with Avanquest as detailed below.

I purchased My Ultimate Organizer 7.0 via download and subsequent key.

I am not making this up - the product displayed a message in Serbo-Croatian telling me the key had expired.

Four hours later with Technical Support and the problem is still not resolved (despite erasing the program, reinstalling, trying different keys, searching the Windows Registry, etc). It takes a full hour on hold to get a technical support representative and at the conclusion of the last session, I was told to contact Customer Service for a CD copy in the hopes that that would resolve the issue. Now Customer Service tells me Technical Support must send me the copy, although Technical Support says otherwise. I am out $30 for a program that is at this point, totally useless, and left adrift by Avanquest who has my money and refuses to help me.

I would purchase Avanquest products with extreme caution. If you have a Technical Support issue, you will have to wait a minimum of 60 minutes on hold (no 800 number), and then get fairly substandard service after that.

I bought this to do more partion management than Vista provides and my old program, Partion Magic, does not play well with Vista. It works fairly well but there are several things that it will not do like restore individual files or folders nor explore a saved image. Also you need to be aware that you need the latest version 10.1 because 10.0 doesn't work with Vista eithe!

Way too much for Vista. Slows everything down and took 13 hours in safe mode to do total backup.

I am an IT consultant and have 10 to 12 computers running in various configurations and combinations. It is just too much work to continually build and rebuild machines without using an image to restore after the first build. I used Ghost for a number of years until version 9. The product just had become so bloated that it was barely useable. I want a slim product that can be launched from a USB drive, backup or restore, to different size hard drives if necessary, then shut down the machine and have the machine boot without issue.
I have been using Perfect Image 12 since it was released. I work with Windows 8 Preview, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Server 2003 and 2008, SQL Server and a few flavors of Linux. I don't use Mac's but the product supports this OS as well. I've installed the program on a Windows 7 Professional 64 bit laptop and let the program create a bootable USB which I use everywhere else. Though once or twice I've had a machine not boot, one or two changes in the bios resolved these issues. So far the product has worked for me without significant issues.
I sometimes use other Avanquest software most of the time with good results. I use to use System Suite by the company until I started using Windows 7 (64bit.) The latest version at that time said it supported this OS but it never installed properly. This program also had too many features, some of which worked better than others. I was ready to drop it anyway.
I have tried all the free Disk Imaging products available, including ImageX from Microsoft and found Perfect Image to be the easiest and most reliable to use.
Perfect Image 12 has a good set of backup options if installed on a PC. I do not use it this way. If you just need to back up personal files, word documents, music, photos etc., use a good online backup solution such as Carbonite. You should do this no matter how many backups you have at home.
I do not doubt the negative experiences reported. There are just too many combinations of hardware and software for all systems to run with all new software.