Perhaps you’ve seen the TV commercials featuring the obviously technically non-savvy mom complaining about how slow her computer is. To the rescue comes her obviously much smarter smarmy son, who fixes her computer’s problems with a single click of the mouse. Or, the commercial where the jovial computer user exclaims, “Finally, my computer is fast! Finally fast dot com!”
Let the buyer beware, though. If you’re not careful, you could be throwing away your money to PC ripoff dot com.
Everyone wishes that computers were easy to use, but, let’s face it: computers are a hassle. Just like cars, computers are great until they don’t run great, any more. When things go wrong, they can be a hassle to repair. What we want is a click-once and everything is fixed solution.
Preying on this pipe-dream are websites promising one-stop, easy-as-pie maintenance and repair programs. These programs go by various names, such as MyCleanPC, FastAtLast, MaxMySpeed, StopSign, DoubleMySpeed, CyberDefender and MyIdentityDefender.
The programs claim to fix all sorts of computer problems, such as removing “junk” files, fighting viruses and spyware, tweaking your hard drive, correcting registry errors and speeding up your Internet connection. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most all of these websites are owned by a single company, Ascentive. The most notorious of Ascentive’s websites is FinallyFast.com.
From what I’ve seen, the problem with FinallyFast-type solutions is that they simply do not work. Many thousands of people, convinced by high-energy commercials, parted with their hard-earned money, only to find that their computers were not finally fast. Worse yet, many computers actually moved slower, not faster. Other problems included dubious credit card charges, crashing machines and difficult-to-remove software, situations that pushed many customers over the edge.
These upset customers were not content to live in their misery. Instead, they took to the Internet in droves, posting stories of their misery to hundreds of different computer-related websites. Many people turned their stories into mini-movies and posted them to YouTube; these displays of outrage all but destroyed FinallyFast’s reputation on the Internet.
The moral of the story here is “caveat emptor.” Many computer problems do not have easy, one-click solutions. Some all-in-one programs, such as System Mechanic, can do a good job, but they’re not free and, if not properly installed, can end up constantly running in the background, which can actually slow things down.
Free programs exist that, used with a combo package approach, can do everything that the bogus, all-in-one programs claim to do. Avira for antivirus and antispyware, Secunia to check for program updates, Windows Update for the operating system, Check Disk for disk defragmenting, and Ccleaner for “junk” files and registry cleanup is about all that you need.
Computers are like cars, requiring frequent upkeep and maintenance. With minimal learning and effort, you can get a lot of miles out of your machine.