Cannot remove/delete Prey from Win10 Laptop to reinstall

Help Windows
#1

Hi I hope someone can help, as I don’t have much hair left with this ‘problem’

I originally had an account in which I had my Mobile and Laptop covered, however for some reason I could not activate the ‘Location’ feature on my Mobile while the Prey program in my Laptop would not run…period!

So I removed my Prey Account and set it up again on my Mobile and that is now OK…

However in trying to Delete everything to do with Prey on my Laptop I found that the Uninstall program failed to run, so I tried following the ‘How to uninstall Prey’ using the Manual Method as defined in the Help section.

First ‘problem’ was that I cannot Disable the Cron Service as after rebooting the darn thing is still ‘Running’
I did however use regedit.exe and deleted all the entries in the Registry as defined by the Help section,

When then rebooting again and going back into the c:/Windows/Prey folder I cannot delete all the Folders still there and definitely cannot delete the Prey Folder as a complete entity as I am told that the Application file cannot be removed as it is in use and also the other file in the folder C:/Windows/Prey/current/bin cannot be deleted even with Administrators rights, as it is in use ‘somewhere else’

I did try changing both the files names to ‘junk’ in the hope that it would stop them running when I rebooted the Laptop but it had no effect.

When I try to Install a fresh download of the program I get an error message telling me the program is already there but I then get another error message advising me that the Install could not go ahead as the previous install cannot be removed!!!

Can anyone assist please?

Cheers

#2

I’m having the same problem…followed pretty much same process…I was able to delete the folders…but I still get the error during attempt to reinstall…it fails.

#3

Hey,
Could you guys check in your task manager if there’s an ‘Execution Service’ or ‘Node.js: Server-side Javascript’ processes running?
Also it’d be useful to check your prey-install.log and prey-uninstall.log, both files are located on C:\Users*your_user_name*\AppData\Local\Temp
You can contact me on javo@preyhq.com

Regards,
Javo

#4

Thanks for getting back to us Javo, but I did wonder if the answer to your first request is ‘Yes’ then what do we do next?
While the thoughts on your next sentence would be:
What would you like me to look for in the logs if I have them or do with them if I find them?

Meanwhile…
I resolved my issue by overwriting the program with a new install so everything is once again ‘hunky dory’
BUT I would say that I am convinced that the Antivirus & Firewall ‘package’ that goes by the name of Zone Alarm (Check Point) was the possible cause of my problem as I have found it to be very Restrictive, Controlling and definitely NOT User Friendly.

But I guess that’s life!

Cheers