We know that a slower computer can be very frustrating and its a pain to sit there while your pdf loads or your email opens. In today’s fast paced world we want instant results and waiting for the latest youtube video (usually about a siamese cat playing the piano, or watching Mariah Carey fall down on stage) to load can be more than annoying. Thats why we are always looking for a quick fix to speed up our computers. The reality is there is rarely a quick fix to speeding up a slow machine. One of the most common searches on Google, is speed up my pc or registry cleaner or pc speed booster. If there was a good program that was guaranteed to do this it would have come with your computer when you bought it, or you would have heard about it from a friend.
Instead we do our search in Google and are presented with thousands of results from companies you never heard of that promise to fix your problems and speed up your computer. Many of these companies spend thousands of dollars trying to get to the top of Google to make sure you go to their website. Others have taken out commercials on Sunday morning that show dozens of happy grandmothers because their computer is so much faster. Believe it or not these programs are making empty promises that often are left unfulfilled. Take a look at the first page of results when you search for “pc registry cleaner” in Google.
At a quick glance many of these results look promising…..but take a closer look and if you are using McAfee Siteadvisor (Read our post about how Siteadvisor can help you prevent getting infected) you will see that at least 2 results are marked as dangerous websites. This means right off the bat you should not visit those sites because they present a risk of your computer getting infected by a virus. The rest of the sites, while many are shown as green offer a software solution, that will attempt to install some kind of software on your PC and perform some kind of voodoo that makes it faster.
Again there are only a few things that can improve your PC performance and those come down to maintaining your PC by removing unused software and defragmenting your hard drive. There is no silver bullet that will make your PC faster. Everything that can be done to make is faster can easily be done by yourself or a good technical person. Even worse, some of the programs that masquerade as registry cleaners and speed boosters will actually slow down your computer even more. If there was a good program out there that actually delivered these promises you would have heard about it from a friend or you would see a larger reputable company doing it like Symantec, McAfee, Trend, or Kaspersky which are all very reputable software companies.
Lets take a look at one company thats behind 2 of the most popular websites out there right now. The company is Cyberdefender (hmmm….thats sounds shady already) They own 2 websites called mycleanpc.com and doublemyspeed.com. Lets stop right there…..why do they have 2 websites that do the same thing? If you wanted learn more about Pepsi would you go to pepsi.com AND awesomecoladrink.com? A reputable company will have one domain name and market one product only.
Ok so lets ignore the fact that they have 2 separate websites. Taking a look at the home pages we see that they have 17 million satisfied customers. Wow it must be good. It also has a USA Today logo quoting “Cyberdefender is fierce” We try to click the logo for USA today but its just an image and doesnt take me anywhere. Hmmm….I wish I could read that article by USA Today that talks about how fierce they are. So lets download this magical piece of software and clean up our registry so I can speed up my slow PC.
Our test machine will be a freshly installed Windows XP machine with no software except the operating system loaded on it. That means its spotless. Theoretically is should have no problems, no registry errors, and its definitely not slow. We download the software and install it on freshly built machine. It does a scan that takes about 10 minutes and amazingly we have 331 errors. Wow, someone should tell Microsoft that a fresh install of Windows comes with 331 errors.
We take a closer look at some of the details of the errors and they are very vague, like empty keys in the registry or startup items that are supposed to be there. Nothing very clear or tangible about the 331 errors. I can’t imagine how many errors the program would find if this was one of the normal machines we get phone calls about on a daily basis. Those machines have been running for 7 to 10 years and have been heavily used over those years. Well clearly my fresh install of Windows XP is broken so I click the big green button that says “Fix All Errors and Speed Up Your PC”. A browser windows opens up that tells me I’m so very close to fixing all my errors and all they need is my billing information so I fix all the errors. I can not imagine how many people pay for this product and see all these clues on the way to the billing page. In their defense they do offer a money back guarantee which is fine but I sure wouldn’t want to track them down to get my money back.
Well, the option of course is yours and you are free to spend your money however you like but take note if you are looking for a quick fix to speed up your PC, there’s always someone waiting for you to find them. When you do, they will promise you the moon and stars in exchange for your credit card information. Just be careful and look for obvious signs of a scam. Here comes the shameless plug…..At Boxaid.com we have no fancy software to sell you and we dont make promises we can’t keep. We have had dozens of phone calls where we do our initial free inspection on an older PC and simply say there is not much we can do to make your PC faster. You are performing all the proper maintenance, and your PC is very clean. It’s simply a matter of older hardware and we would rather see you invest your money in a new computer instead of wasting it.
About George Dover
George Dover is one of the Microsoft Certified Technicians that works at BoxAid.com. He is the primary blog contributor and has helped thousands of customers calling into BoxAid on a daily basis. Connect with me on Google+
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