Sometimes They Come Back

A resurgence of TV ads for testing your PCs performance and repairing problems is happening. Ascentive the company behind the FinallyFast ad, had its PC tune up programs installed on a PC I tested. The malware scanning software used found these Ascentive programs added spyware to the PC.

The latest advertisements seen mostly late at night follow the pattern of FinallyFast. My problem with such advertising is that it is easy to advertise to millions of PC users, easy to provide software that does something good and bad to a PC, and easy to collect $89 to $130 per PC user for whatever was done.

In my previous test I found that the PC performance test results remained the same even after I had tuned up the PC. These programs typically test for free, but charge for repair. So I used the RegCure program to test and other free programs to repair. About 80% of the problems found by RegCure were repaired by the free programs. It is not certain that the remaining 20% were valid problems. One new program is www.MyCleanPC.com which downloads a program called CyberDefender. When downloaded and installed, it scanned my PC. Also at each PC start a CyberDefender Window was displayed. To fix the errors found cost $89. My free programs reduced the errors by 40 and fixed hundreds of other errors that CyberDefender did not report. I am not convinced that the CyberDefender repairs would significantly speed up the PC better then my free programs. It seems better than FinallyFast. Removing bad Windows software and Security suites makes the biggest improvement in PC performance in my experience.

Why is it unlikely that such software will improve the performance of your PC? These websites send down programs to a huge variety of PCs that are supposed to fix problems on all of them. Certainly all PCs have some common elements that can be adjusted to improve performance, but there are other elements and software configurations (what I term the software blend of the PC) for which such programs cannot make effective adjustments.

Think of it this way, I send you a list of instructions on how to complete breakfast faster. Now every kitchen has common elements appliances, silverware, plates, and so on. Without knowing anything about your kitchen, I assume these common elements and suggest that to make breakfast faster use larger plates and not small plates so loading plates into the dishwasher is quicker. However, your situation has you using paper plates at breakfast so this advice has minimal impact.

As a nerd when I tune up a PC and remove viruses, the steps I perform are:

1. Physically clean out the PC. Blow all the dust out of a PC with a shop vac.

2. Check your disk for physical damage

3. Make an image of your disk drive to save all your important data

4. Scan for viruses and spyware with several programs – AVG, McAfee, and more.

5. Remove bad Windows components (IE8 on Windows XP, Windows Desktop Search, and others.)

6. Remove performance sapping programs loaded at PC start up (e.g. Security Suites and more).

7. Scan and defragment the Registry with several different scanners to remove junk

8. Test the PC to make sure it is running better

9. Show you how to maintain your PC so you do not call me for at least a year

My point is that no downloaded software can do this. Since downloaded software costs one third as much, do you pay that price for little or full price for complete service? One nerd customer tried a remote clean up. It improved performance for a week, but then slipped back to what was happening before. When the PC was examined, the problem cause was a failing hard drive. Please do not act on slick TV advertisements and promises because sometimes they come back just to haunt you, but not help you.