I'm wondering if this software download is safe?

[uberman]

I go into a thrift store the other day and I find a new toy, $13.00. Its a business card scanner with OCR brand new in the box. Its pretty cool; however, the software and/or drivers are listed as WIN XP. Here's a CardScan 7 for sale on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dymo-CardSc...1426101841?pt=US_Scanners&hash=item41864d8651

I'm looking around for WIN 7 software and I find this link. I think it looks shady and probably won't do anything positive. Linky below:

http://megaupl0ad.pw/files/cardscan v7 software free

Any ideas and or recommendations as to whether this software is legit? Could I end up screwing up windows or worse?

 

[Mike64]

I'm looking around for WIN 7 software and I find this link. I think it looks shady and probably won't do anything positive. Linky below:

http://megaupl0ad.pw/files/cardscan%20v7%20software%20free

Any ideas and or recommendations as to whether this software is legit? Could I end up screwing up windows or worse?

The short answer is that it's most unlikely to be legit. Keep googling...


The longer answer is:

A) A lot of software on megaupload was, indeed, "shady" (ie, cracked/keygen-ed "warez"), but a lot of it was more or less safe in the sense that it was not virus/malware-infected.

B) Note that megaupload, which was a more or less safe site, was shut down in 2012! The link you posted is to some rip-off site (note the zero instead of an "oh" and the URL extension .pw), which imnsho makes it triple shady. Indeed, Malwarebytes blocked me when I tried to navigate to it. (Malwarebytes site-blocking is kind of hyper, imo, but I'm not unblocking it just out of curiosity. )

Personally, I do occasionally download stuff from "warez" sites, but I scan the living daylights out of all of it before I even consider running it. (And for what it's worth, I've managed to avoid malware infections for longer than I can remember...)

If you've tried the XP software and it doesn't work, try looking for something that runs/ran on Vista, and see if that'll work. If it's really old equipment, there's unlikely to be a specific Windows 7 driver for it, but the older software may still work.

If you can't find anything else, and you're desperate for the software, you could try downloading it and then run multiple scans - with your own malware scanners, and then run it through virusscan.jotti.org and/or www.virustotal.com.

If by some wild chance it manages to clear all of that, it's "probably" safe, though you could go even a step further and run it in a sandbox just to be sure....

 

[uberman]

Wow! What an awesome analysis! There are so many educated computer people here. It looked shady to me. I do have the scanner working on a WIN XP machine and it is pretty cool, and $13.00 is a great price.

Thank you. I'll keep poking around looking for a fix or compatibilty as I move some machines to WIN 7.

 

[John Connor]

I run Sandboxie, Bitdefender free and Noscript addon in Pale Moon. I didn't get an alert to the webpage, but I had to allow a script and it went from Softpedia to some downloader app that you must install to be able to download the file. If I had VMware on this laptop I would try it out. VMware is on my desktop. I did scan the downloader with malwarebytes Bitdefender and SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition and they found nothing.

 

[bbhaag]

IDK man that looks really shady. When I went to close the page a pop up asked me if I really wanted to leave the page. That's a sure tell sign that something isn't right.

 

[Mike64]

Wow! What an awesome analysis! There are so many educated computer people here. It looked shady to me. I do have the scanner working on a WIN XP machine and it is pretty cool, and $13.00 is a great price.

Thank you. I'll keep poking around looking for a fix or compatibilty as I move some machines to WIN 7.

Have you tried the XP software on your Win7 machine? It won't hurt to try it, might work...

 

[John Connor]

Yes, you can right click the .exe and select compatibility mode for XP.

 

[uberman]

Yes, you can right click the .exe and select compatibility mode for XP.

Its because of the compatability mode in WIN 7 that I upgraded 2 machines to WIN 7 PRO rather than WIN 7 so I could take advantage of compatability mode. I just haven't had luck with the so-called compatability mode. I haven't spent a long time trying to make it work.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Its because of the compatability mode in WIN 7 that I upgraded 2 machines to WIN 7 PRO rather than WIN 7 so I could take advantage of compatability mode. I just haven't had luck with the so-called compatability mode. I haven't spent a long time trying to make it work.

Compatibility Mode is the same between Home and Pro. You've thinking of "XP Mode", which is a VirtualPC VM image of a real XP installation.