Sucks man, my alarm was not working for about a week and I was too lazy to mess with it and my window got smashed in and they stole a $650 ish Pioneer deck, I was at work for maybe 10 mins. I still want to find those ______.
Well here is my opinion on alarms. There are many ways to go and if you want the best of the best the 2way alarm is the route to take (Buy a lot of AAA batteries). How they work is there is a keypad that lets you know the status of you car, it tells you when the car is being messed with, whether the doors are locked or unlocked, if the door is open, the car is started (if you have remote start), etc etc... This is the type of alarm I have and the only benefit I see from it is I can tell whether I remembered to lock my doors or not by looking at the keypad (I have this issue with thinking I forgot to lock my doors lol even though I always do). The majority of the time I am so far away from the car that the remote is not picking up signal from the brain in the car so I will have no idea if something is happening anyways. The battery backup is nice to give you that piece of mind. The proximity sensor is nice if you have a convertable and don't want someone reaching into your car, or if you have a coupe and don't want people looking through your windows too closely. The power window mods are dumb (I have one and never use it). The trunk pin and hood pin can be beneficial in certain instances. The remote start is completely your call and can now be done on cars with manual transmission because DEI has a new model that works with them and causes no chance for mistakes. Keyless entry is a must. I'm sure i'm missing something and if I were to do it again I would buy a cheap 200 dollar alarm we sell and put that on since it will get the job done for me but some people may want/require more.
As far as Directed, they are a very good alarm company, the best one i've delt with. Stay away from the cheap stuff unless you want issues, you get what you pay for. Audiovox SUCKS.
Directed includes:
Viper
Python
Valet
Clifford
and more
They are all pretty much the same stuff with different names, Viper is no better than Python and Python is no better than Clifford etc.
Hope this helps
Josh