I was watching TV and saw a commercial for some more bullshit one-click “optimizers” that don’t really do anything, so I got on Youtube and apparently I’m not the only one that was annoyed by Ascentive’s hokey ad:
Wow, where do I start?
I ended up downloading their software and trying to run it in Wine, some of it worked, most of it crashed, the parts that did work took you to web pages on Ascentive’s website where they try to make more bogus claims about their product, where they say things like “275% faster!!!” in red size 27 font.
Another hallmark of a scam artist is to pull out a war chest of “endorsements” as “proof” that their crap will work, one of the supposed “endorsers” is TechTV, the outfit that used to employ famed internet whore Chris Pirillo.
This is the same kind of snake oil that Pirillo would peddle.
Anyway, I filed a bug in Wine:
Bug#: 14872 PC Optimizer spyware cannot run in Wine.
I had it installed into a Prefix so that it couldn’t damage my Wine installation, but I noticed a few things that it would do to a Windows user, including modification of the registry so that it will run on startup and pelt you with more ads to buy their crap, and when you uninstall it, it has a checkbox (unchecked by default) “Do not automatically install again later”, it’s unbelievable that a company would have to resort to this.
Their behavior borders on the kind of stuff you see with rogue antivirus.
I just can’t believe this crapware is on TV now, yuck.
One more reason I won’t run Windows on anything I have to depend on, most scams thrive on something real, and Windows is so error prone and difficult to fix, that fly by nights like this can exploit the ignorance of many computer users.
If you want a faster computer, you need to buy faster hardware, more RAM, better processor, new video card.
I don’t know exactly what these con artists are charging, but you could probably buy double your RAM, or maybe even a video card, for whatever their One Click Crapfest costs.
If you’re real hard up, a $40 dual core Celeron makes a good upgrade from a Pentium 4. ;)
Even back 10 years ago, I remember seeing Ascentive conning people, so this tells us that there are obviously enough Windows users that are stupid enough to keep this company running.
The difference is that with Windows 98, the utilities might have done something, they were still snake oil, but there were a bazillion tweaks you could make that caused a night-and-day difference in how Windows performed (Like ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 or adjusting the Vcache settings), this is no longer really true with XP and Vista.
And the registry, while horrible, and a mess, will not cause any noticable degradation in the computer’s performance.
Looking around online, I see that a lot of people that were conned into installing Ascentive software say that it actually messes things up when you uninstall it. Nothing like ransomware, huh?
Just for the hell of it, here are actual testimonials: (emphasis is mine)
“Oh my goodness, what a difference!…My Internet speed has been incredible, even with my dial-up modem and a very modest connection rate with AOL at 26,000 bps. I will recommend ActiveSpeed to everyone I know!”
“I could never figure out why my computer was running so slowly. PC SpeedScan found and removed my computer errors and now my computer runs like brand new.”
“I have had many virus and spyware attacks. Spyware Striker Pro software has saved me more times then I can count.”
—and the kicker—
“ I was hoping to get rid of a few particular, very persistent pop-ups. As it turns out, they were either Trojans or so deeply hidden that I just couldn’t find them no matter what software program I used. When I reloaded my Windows XP and then loaded up your software, I haven’t had a reoccurrence of those particular, very persistent, pop-ups.”
Scam artists often rely on tons of emphatic and fake testimonials that they have made up themselves.
The scary thing is that somewhere out there, there is a woman in menopause, living in a trailer with 300 cats, that bought her eMachine with her alimony check and proceeded to load AOL on it, but couldn’t afford all 56,600 baud.
The people that buy this shit are blissfully unaware that the only computer error that needs removed is them.
The third dude is an obvious porn addict that doesn’t know that if a porn site requires anything more than the plugins you already have, or Adobe Flash, you probably should leave NOW.
The fourth one is just funny, “So deeply rooted that NOTHING else could find it”, he sounds like he couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a bloodhound.
I also have a confession to make…….
Send me money, bitches!
