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Most Speed-Up-Your-PC Programs Are Bogus

by Tim Stevens on March 16, 2009 at 03:47 PM


Surely you've seen the annoying ads on television or flashing banner graphics on your favorite sites advertising applications guaranteed to take your slow-as-molasses computer and make it run like new again? Hopefully you've never taken the plunge and clicked or installed, but Slate's Farhad Manjoo did. Out of curiosity, he installed My Faster PC just to see what it would do to his computer. As it turns out, it didn't really do a thing -- other than milk him for $30.

That program, and the dozens of others like it, pledge to clean up supposed detritus left behind by months or years of computing. Sadly, My Faster PC relies largely on tools that are already on your computer, like Microsoft's disk defragmenter, which re-arranges things on your computer's hard drive to speed it up. It's automatically enabled in Vista (here's how to adjust it) and you can get to it in XP by going to "My Computer," right-clicking on your hard drive (C: or D:), clicking "Properties," clicking "Tools," and then clicking "Defragment Now."

Is your PC running more slowly than usual?
Yes717 (70.1%)
No234 (22.9%)
I'm not sure.72 (7.0%)



The only other thing My Faster PC supposedly does is clean your registry of unnecessary entries, but that's something you can do for free with CCleaner -- and it probably won't make a difference anyway. As always, just make sure you do a backup of your important data before you do either of these things. There, you just saved $30. Now go spend it on something nice -- like more memory for your computer. [From: Slate]


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Tags: ccleaner, computers, defragment, defragmenting, my faster pc, MyFasterPc, performance, registry, top, upgrades, windows

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