I’ve seen this ad on TV for a program to speed up your computer off on on when viewing cable. The program that installed was called “Cyber Defender”. It’s listed in many sites on the internet as a possible Virus, Trojan or Rogue.

It would do one and only one operation and that was to scan the registry. Or at least it appeared that’s what it was doing. I was locked out of selecting any other options. Then it reported over 400 errors in my registry, but when I hit the button to Fix the problems, it took me right to there web site, where I was presented with the opportunity to spend money to buy their program.

This whole thing is nothing but a scam to get your money. Never download such a program. There are some really great programs perform that do this already and you do NOT have to pay for them.

Look, I  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 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.

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, you will see that at least two 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.

Here is a testimonial, on how poorly this service really is:

Well, I purchased this service for $65 for the next year, expecting the service to clean my pc once I paid this fee. All they did was tell me how many threats/viruses my computer contained, and told me i needed to take the computer to best buy or staples and pay an additional $200-$300 to take these viruses off – or in other words, to CLEAN MY PC – something they advertised to do, not best buy or staples.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 19:50 by dsmith and is filed under Best Practices, Cost Savings, FUD, Malware, Recovery, Repair, Ripoff, Trojan, Virus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.