My niece recently had a computer problem. She had already actually paid for the Uniblue registry booster program, in the belief that it would do what it claimed, defrag and all the rest, and speed up her computer. When it didn’t seem to work she asked me to look at it.
There were the usual problems, one was resource hungry Norton AntiVirus, another was an assortment of Spyware that MalwareBytes etc easily got rid of, another was the great variety of programs that start when you turn on your computer and that can be seen if you go to Start/Run, type msconfig and look at the Startup tab. Some are very necessary, most are usually not. More details here
http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php
The defrag situation on her computer was the worst I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what the program she bought was actually doing but it wasn’t defragging the drives. Perhaps it’s only claiming to defrag the Registry. She said that it had found 500 errors when she first ran it and had been finding very many each day thereafter. I would categorise it as ScareWare.
The main problem was an acute shortage of RAM. The 512mb that was quite adequate three years ago was being gobbled up by Norton and Skype and the other programs, every new version of which requires more resources, and slowing the computer to a crawl. I bought 2GB of used RAM on Ebay for A$40 (£23) and now it’s as good as new.
If your computer is running okay don’t install unnecessary programs that will only slow it down. Stick to the tried and proven anti virus and anti spyware programs. If you must run a registry cleaner try something innocuous like CCleaner, everybody loves it, and it’s free.
http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/CCleaner/ccleaner.html
I thought AV programs like AVG were in the AV business rather than the registry cleaner business. I’ve never had any sort of message from an AV program asking me to buy anything except for a very rare reminder that I can upgrade to a paid version. I dumped AVG a long time ago when it started to annoy me, I can’t remember the details, and switched to Avast. It doesn’t annoy me.
Alan
