I checked several rather militant threads castigating MWB for listing Advanced Systemcare as a PUP. My experience has been the opposite. My ancient XP desktop has begun acting up after a series of rapid fire "updates" by ASC and Iobit Malware Fighter. The thing started running slow, bouncing out of websites I've used for years and generally giving me hassle. I did some research into this China-based software and didn't like what I saw - having shared some of the same problems of late as others. I know XP is ancient history, but until I can afford to buy several $800 software programs to replace programs that run perfectly well for me on XP, I'm not going to ditch all that for Microsoft's convenience or anyone else's.
I figured I would just close down ASC and MW Fighter and uninstall them. My ISP gives me a full up version of Norton 360 that does all that, so I'm dumping several duplication-of-service memory resident programs to make the old girl lean and smooth. The next boot-up I'd lost my boot.ini file and all sorts of corruption messages came up. I ran Kaspersky's rootkit killer. It came up clean. MWB found some pups and a bit of adware that Iobit missed. It reminds me of a hotel guest that trashed the room when he checked out. I'm not sure ASC didn't throw some kind of tantrum on the way out. Now Norton 360 won't run the live anti-virus update and I can't reinstall it because of a corrupt memory reference I get when I run Norton's remove and reinstall utility. So I'm without anti-virus protection and I can't get any other similar protection utilities to run right. I'm about to run my Glary Utilities scan, but it being a direct competitor of Iobit, I'm almost afraid of what will happen if I do.
I've had to wipe and reinstall the boot.ini file three times now. I get it working and I lose it when I try to reboot. I get this feeling that if I reinstall ASC and Iobit Malware Fighter that all will be well again. Am I being paranoid or is it possible the Chinese are jerking me around because I removed their software. It wasn't easy to uninstall in the first place.. ASC would certainly be a great way to get inside a lot of American computers and do God knows what. Maybe I'm just frustrated and overdo for an upgrade on my desktop. I'm going to hate losing Photoshop and Pagemaker. They still work great and do what I want them to do. I don't want to pay monthly fees to use them. I don't want to learn a bunch of new software. I'm 63 and I have to much to do to have to go back and relearn a bunch of software written by a bunch of 20-somethings who haven't a clue how people actually think and couldn't make an intuitive command sequence to save their own lives.
End of Rant
