On Thursday, April 10, 2014 10:04:02 AM UTC-4, Mayayana wrote:
| PC for 3+ years now. It came free with the HP system and I extended

| the license for 2 more years for $30. That was a good deal



It's a good deal compared to what it used to cost. Not

so long ago it was $70 just for the System Works software.

It's still probably $70 for Norton Internet Security if you go buy
it retail. You can find it online, eg Ebay for $25 for a 3 PC license.




But now there are several well-regarded AV programs that

cost nothing. (I don't know how or why that makes sense

for those companies, but they are free.) Given the history of

Symantec I think there's no question that they would charge

you a lot more if they could get away with it.



That's exactly what a business is supposed to do. Maximize
profits. What do you expect? If you had a house to sell, what
would you do?



If you don't know anything about Symantec's history

then you have no reason to avoid supporting their business.

But you still paid $30 for two years worth of a product

that's easily available for free. I think that fits with my

characterization of "unwitting". I don't mean to be insulting. I

just hate to see people taken in by sleazy companies.



I've used Symantec products for years. There is nothing that
I've seen that I would characterize as "sleazy". It's just
that you like a different product or a free product. Use what you want,
but don't characterize others that make other choices as "unwitting".




There are a number of products that one just has no reason

to pay for, yet companies get away with selling those products

at a high price simply because the general public doesn't know

the facts. One can often find such products on the shelves

of software stores. Among them are AV, ZIP programs, CD/DVD

writer software, FTP programs, audio editing programs, music

player software, image viewers and hex editors. In all cases those

programs are available free, and the free versions are among the

best.



Maybe so. And maybe for $30 for two years of current software for
3 PCs, it isn't worth my time trying to figure out which free antivirus alternative is a good one and which isn't. Nor is it worth it to
screw around with what is working. Antivirus is one of the programs
that people have the most trouble with from a compatibility standpoint
with other apps, etc. If it's not broke, I don't have a compelling
need to fix it to save $15 a year.




A truly bogus category is "cleaners" that claim to power up

your PC by removing bad Registry entries and unused junk files.

But lots of people buy that stuff. Those programs are 99%

useless. (They're 100% useless if you check and clean your

TEMP folder occasionally.) The typical Registry "cleaning"

procedure, removing hundreds of "faulty" entries, is roughly

equivalent to removing an old ballpoint pen from your packed

garage. The pen might truly be rubbish, but disposing

of it doesn't make your garage any more useful or any easier

to navigate.



If you don't think that's true then I invite you to look into

what Registry entries are removed and what their function is.

You'll find that the entries generally fall into 2 categories:



* Settings for software that's been removed. Those settings

are harmless and might be useful if the software is ever

re-installed. They take up less room than the ballpoint pen.



* HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\* These would be settings

for components that have been removed, probably when

software was uninstalled. Again, those settings are harmless.

If some software wants to use the specified component you'll

get an error whether the setting is left there or not, because

the component is gone.



But isn't it inefficient for this extra stuff to be left in the

Registry? No. There are several MB of data in the Registry.

Those unused settings might take up 1-10 KB. If you run a

Registry monitor while starting up Internet Explorer you'll

see that IE accesses the Registry *thousands* of times in

about 1 second when it loads. That's stunningly efficient.

To improve that speed by some fraction of a microsecond

would be trying to improve on the speed of instant.

You wouldn't buy a tool that promises to make your garage

door open faster by removing a ballpoint pen from a shelf in

the back of the garage. That's basically what Registry cleaners

claim to do.


The cleaner thing, while I haven't looked into it at great
length, I tend to agree with what you're saying. On the other hand,
there is no question that PCs do tend to slow down over a few
years, eventually start misbehaning, due to specifically what, I'm not
sure it's easy to figure out. And I doubt that the cleaner utilities
are going to solve it. In my experience, at some point, if the
performance has declined, it's behaving erratically and you can't
figure out something that is obvious as the cause, then it's time
to re-install the OS and software, which fixes everything for sure.




All of that kind of thing could be broadly regarded as crapware.

It's not necessarily all bad software, but it's all stuff you don't

need and definitely shouldn't pay for.

I define crapware as pre-installed software on a PC that is totally
unnecessary, useless to most people, and/or intrusive, eg it starts
showing pop-up adds.