Everyone wants a faster PC, so the PC Speed Up industry has rolled out the products. Unfortunately, some are a ripoff or at least misleading. The Washington State Attorney Generals office has forced FinallyFast.com – makers of those late night commercials – pay refunds amounting to tens of thousands of dollars.
While that’s hardly a dent in the bucket to the millions they apparently have made, it should serve as a warning to those who might be tempted to pay for a PC Speed Up service.
Yes, PC’s get gunked up – often by our own foolish actions. Yes, Windows is self-corrupting, and perhaps even poorly designed in that the Windows Registry can easily get bloated and severely hamper your PC’s performance.
One product that I have seen good reports on for Windows Registry repair is Registry Mechanic from PCTools.
As for the crapware that builds up and slows your PC, there are many free utilities to help with that. Both LavaSoft and MalwareBytes offer decent free cleaning of gunked up PC’s. Sure they offer paid upgrades but not everyone needs those.
Maybe your PC is running slow because of inadequate RAM (Random Access Memory). Windows XP and above prefer 2GB and if you have Windows 7 you really should be running 4GB (on some PC’s 4GB may only show up as 3GB, just so you know).
If you want to know if your PC supports more memory and what it would cost, one of the easiest ways of getting guaranteed compatible memory is to use the Crucial Memory Advisor Tool.
For screaming fast PC performance, get rid of your hard drive by upgrading to an SSD (Solid State Drive).
Ripoffs abound in the area of PC Speed Up. Beware of popups that tell you they found errors or warn of problems. Use only trusted services, most will at least scan for free.
If anything about it looks scammy, just LEAVE the site.
One PC Speed Up service that is not only professional but a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner is Slow PC Fighter. These guys have been around a long time and to my knowledge doing a good job and not ripping people off. The instant scan is free.
FinallyFast.com was made to pay, but only to some users and only in the state of Washington. They are still out there, still advertising on TV and the web, still making tons of money from desperate, unsuspecting computer users – don’t be one of them.
They are about making money (as any business) but by using tricks and scams that closed down most eCommerce companies in the 90’s. This company is less than honorable and hopefully one day the government will wake up and not only shut them down but sue the CEO for everything he has. The entire company is a scam. Their software doesn’t do anything that it promises – look at their ActiveSpeed program – run the speed test and it tells you your Internet is not optimized. I find it funny that I ran the test with my computer not connected to the Internet and with it connected to the Internet and it gave me the same score both times. Not to mention I have a network monitoring app on my PC and no network traffic came from the software so how exactly did it test my Internet speed??? I find it funny that with their SpywareStriker program when I ran it against McAfee, Norton, and AVG they all found 10 times as many viruses on my PC, not to mention my Nod32 software picked it up as a virus. They sell a product called BeAware that doesn’t support anything current (Skype, MySpace, Facebook, any current webmail, no current chat clients). And let’s also look at all of their pricing is listed as “Regular Price = $39.99 / Sale Price = $29.99 / Save $10.00” which has been how it’s been listed as long as they have been in business. And let’s look at the fact that they were sued by the Attorney General of Washington State, they have complaints all over the Internet from ticked off customers going back as far as the company has been in business. If you are smart, you will steer clear of these con-artists or be sorry when your money and your PC is non-recoverable.
Also forgot to mention that they are complete cowards. I posted negative comments on the blog on their website several times and mysteriously they were all deleted. Must not like the truth about the garbage they sell.