I've been having to use Winproxy in order to share the Internet with the 5 Computers in my house. Because the Internet I use is Starband - Satellite Internet through Dish Network - Shitty, but the best I can get out on this farm, rural NYS.

Anyway in order to have 5 PC's hooked up, I had to pay $99 for Winproxy 4.0, and it was shitty, tones of glitches, errors, and caused a lot of crashes and stuff. They came out with several updates for 4.0, A through N, 13.

And now they've fixed pretty much all there problems, and put that into 5.0. But get this, you have to pay for it again. It's now $45 for Winproxy 4.0 owners to get a new 5.0 serial number.

And also, they do NOT offer, the latest version of 4.0. There just like use what you got, which is s***, or buy our new software.

So WinProxy is basically saying. You paid $99 for our flawed software. We fixed it, so now give us $50 more to use it.



Ps's me right off.

Note. The main PC, is on XP which gives internet to the other XP PC. But when I try it on an ME, or 98SE PC, the modem just loses the connection or crashes.

I agree they are not being very customer friendly but what they are doing is in no way illegal. You need to check your User licence agreement on version 4 of the software to see if they offered free upgrades on later versions. If not then you just bought that one version of the software.

If version 4 was so bad that it was unfit for the purpose for which it was intended then you had recourse under your country's warranty laws. If the warranty period has expired there's little you can do to force them to replace it with a newer version.

Free software upgrades are something that private users have come to expect, but for commercial applications an upgrade cost is normal.
As part of my work I have seen a number of applications that include agreements on upgrades, generally 'point' upgrades are free ie 1.1 to 1.15 as they are bug fixes or minor releases , but major releases like 2.0 have to be paid for.
One company I worked for decided to not buy the upgrades for a number of years, when they wanted to go from version 3.0 to 6.0 they had to pay for patching software to be written by the vendor as 6.0 could not be directly overlayed on v 3.0, then they had to pay to have their data converted from 3.0 to 6.0 standard.

So I can understand your frustration but charging for software upgrades is normal practice for many software houses.

Hint: BST:)

Can't say no more before i get in trouble....:zombie:

Why don't you just buy a router? $50-$100 for a decent low end router and you can hook all your systems up to it to share the internet.

OR

Since you're running Windows XP on the main system, use the built in internet sharing capabilities of that OS. 98se and ME also have internet sharing capabilities built in.

The 5 computers are connected through a hub. But as far as using XP's Internet Sharing, As I said If I try to use the internet on the ME or 98SE PC, it just disconnects this Starband connection.

And BST - I havent been able to get registered. I requested it once via e-mail, then April 1, came along, then they said June 1, so I've requested it again. And I've been here for like 2 years, i dunno, I cant get in.

Oh yah, and I realized what they did was legal, just an expression.

Did you understand what I ment? Don't use WinProxy, use the Internet Sharing capabilities already built into Windows or use a router.

And a Hub is not a Router. A router will allow you to share your internet connection without installing additional software on any of the systems. It's hardware based internet sharing.

That would have been my first choice in such case... Yep... QWERTY is 100% there. Hardware based internet sharing with almost no conflicts and a way ahead sharing performance than any (buggy) software like WinProxy.

Switch to another free proxy program, there is loads out there, just search on google. Any computer thats windows 98se and later (i.e. ME, 2000 and XP) all support internet conection sharing, and also i have got windows NT working with it as well, with no effort (installed IE 6 and it just picked up the settings). ICS is easy to use and best of all is free already in windows, you just need to turn it on (refer to windows help).

re: your problems, write to them and demand a refund for the origional product, since it doesn't work properly, and thats what you paid for, so they breached the contract in supplying faulty goods.