Advance System Care - PUPS? Please!!!!!

[8DollarBill]

I have read that ASC has pirated some of your scripts. Sorry about this. But PLEASE get out of this pissing contest as Malwarebytes is continually harassing me that ASC is a PUP.. Even when I update ASC, MB kills the program.

Popups, right now are asking me to quarantine ASC.

Yeah, there is a workaround or stop MBAM from ignoring ASC or even stopping MBAM flagging ALL PUPs, but, come on fellows. Get your differences settled so that we customers are caught in the middle. I am a Premium Member, and thinking about canceling Malwarebytes going straight to Zeman or someone else. I don't really like ASC Malware Fighter, but ..... GET the Picture!!

[exile360]

ASC never pirated any of Malwarebytes' scripts; long ago the company that makes ASC allegedly stole the Malwarebytes database (along with several others belonging to other reputable antimalware vendors) and used them in their antimalware product (not ASC).  The detection of ASC as PUP has absolutely nothing to do with Malwarebytes' history with iOBit, otherwise not only would ASC have been detected as PUP LONG before Malwarebytes actually started detecting it (which was only recently, and only due to a change in the PUP policy which enabled the Research team to be more aggressive against PUPs), but Malwarebytes would also have started detecting all of iOBits' apps as PUP, yet they do not.  ASC is detected as PUP for a valid reason, and that is because it meets the current criteria for PUP classification under the current policies used by Malwarebytes to determine what apps should be detected as PUP, which has absolutely nothing to do with the company's history in relation to Malwarebytes and the world of antimalware applications.

I am of the personal opinion that ASC should be detected as PUP based solely on their overly aggressive and often deceitful advertising tactics where users are tricked into downloading ASC when intending to download some completely different product/software on a reputable download site simply because ASC has purchased ad space on the page in (in my opinion) misuses that space by displaying nothing but large, green, legitimate looking "Download" and "Download Now" buttons, nowhere indicating that those buttons are not for the intended application being hosted on the page, but are actually ads linking to downloads of ASC.  This is an all too common and quite nefarious tactic used to trick users into installing a product they had no intention of installing to begin with in my opinion and should absolutely qualify for classification as PUP because I guarantee that more often than not, many users who installed ASC this way definitely did NOT want it which is the very definition of a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP).

There are other reasons too, not the least of which is the inclusion of an overly aggressive registry cleaner which has been shown to remove things it should not and to indicate serious system issues/instability where none actually exists; at least that's what I saw from it in the past when I tried it long ago (the Malwarebytes Research team had to use/test it far more recently than I did as I tested it out personally long before it ever got classified as PUP).

Edited December 7, 2017 by exile360

[exile360]

By the way, if as a workaround to this detection you wish to more easily exclude the application from detection without disabling PUP detection altogether you may find the information in this post to be of help.

[Unicore]

There is absolutely no reason to use any software made by IObit.  The company and its products are not trustworthy.

[lock]

7 hours ago, Unicore said:

The company and its products are not trustworthy

And we are supposed to believe you because ......?????

[Unicore]

7 hours ago, lock said:

And we are supposed to believe you because ......?????

Actually you should do your own independent and objective research.  The result of that research will be that IObit has a long history of producing software that will harm your computer and that any and all of their products should be avoided.  Why put a known thief in charge of your security?

 

[lock]

17 hours ago, Unicore said:

Actually you should do your own independent and objective research.  The result of that research will be that IObit has a long history of producing software that will harm your computer and that any and all of their products should be avoided.  Why put a known thief in charge of your security?

 

OK, read here:

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2471244,00.asp

"I tested Advanced SystemCare 9 Free's ability to reinvigorate a PC by performing two tests—running the Geekbench system performance tool and measuring boot times—before and after running the software to compare the computer's speed. I ran each test three times and averaged the results.

 

Before the software tuned the system, my 2GHz Intel Core i7 X990 Style-Note notebook with 4GB of RAM and an 80GB Intel SSD drive achieved a 5,914 Geekbench score and booted in 50.3 seconds.

After I ran Advanced SystemCare 9, system performance improved. The GeekBench score rose to 6,201—a bit behind SlimWare Utilities SlimCleaner Free's category-leading 6,338 score. That said, the test bed's boot time decreased to 41.16 seconds, which is on par with SlimCleaner's 14's 41.1-second mark."

[Unicore]

The review you mentioned was written by Jeffrey L. Wilson who also has very high praise for nine other system tuneup programs.  As a matter of fact he rates five of the other system tuneup utilities as better than the IObit program and the other three are rated equal to the IObit program.  Therefore the IObit program is a second rate tuneup utility based upon Mr. Wilson's rating.

However, in reality, all of the rated programs should not be used because they involve the use of registry cleaners.  You do not need a registry cleaner.  It will harm your OS.  Registry cleaners are nothing more than digital snake oil:  https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/are-registry-cleaners-safe-to-use/1a25f8c1-d12e-43d1-a01d-a8f43d6aee2f?auth=1

[exile360]

There are exactly 3 things (other than a hardware upgrade like adding RAM/changing to faster RAM, upgrading to an SSD/faster drive etc.) that one can do that might effect system performance and boot time, none of which involved "cleaning" the registry:

1. Remove unnecessary startups (entries in the RUN keys in the registry, STARTUP folder in the START menu, Services, drivers etc.) that load on boot/run in the background

2. Defragment a badly fragmented drive (unnecessary/not recommended for SSD's, only HDD's)

3. Defragment/compress the registry (this generally only has a marginal effect unless the system has been on the same Windows installation for several years and has had many software installs/uninstalls in that time and generally only noticeably improves performance on older Windows versions such as XP as Windows handles defragmentation of the registry hives automatically with normal defragmentation/optimization in newer (Vista+) Windows versions)

Removing unnecessary/orphaned registry keys, deleting temporary files, cookies and other obsolete data has little or no effect on performance (and can actually slow browsing to websites you visit frequently since you're eliminating cached content saved to disk).  There are tools to do all of these things, many of which are free and none of which require a "registry cleaner" or "system optimizer" to do so.  Among them are tools such as Sysinternals Autoruns (now owned by Microsoft), Malwarebytes Startuplite (somewhat dated now, but still useful for eliminating some startups), Tweaking.com's Registry Compressor and CCleaner (which does include an optional registry cleaning component, however it's far less aggressive than that in tools like ASC, though we still don't recommend using it to clean the registry since doing so generally does more harm than good, or at least has the potential to).  We have info on improving system performance in this post which might be useful to you.

As for tools like ASC, I'd argue that even if running it once had some kind of effect on system performance, that doing so on any sort of regular basis is totally excessive and unnecessary and likely has no effect whatsoever on system performance.  It's like running a temp file cleaner, disk defragmentation tool or any other maintenance utility.  It's not something that is needed often and generally only needs to be done after a long time and long line of significant system changes and usage (installing/uninstalling a lot of software etc.).

With a registry cleaner like ASC or any other there is always the risk of removing a key that it thinks is orphaned but actually isn't which may result in broken software installations, sudden errors out of the blue or even problems with Windows itself in severe cases where a critical system key is removed by mistake.  In my opinion it is not an activity that warrants the risk involved, especially if you don't know what you're doing and cannot check the detected registry entries yourself and know what they mean/what software they are for to validate that they are in fact safe to remove.  For example, I will occasionally run the registry cleaner in CCleaner after I've uninstalled some piece of software in order to delete any leftovers (not for the sake of performance, but just because of my own OCD), but I read through each and every line it detects/flags for removal and only check the ones I know are safe to remove/belong to software no longer installed on my system and leave all others unchecked (and yes, it pretty much always detects keys it claims are orphaned which belong to software/components still present on the system, which is why I do not and cannot recommend registry cleaners to others, especially when they're known to be even more aggressive than CCleaner which I know first-hand detects/tries to remove things it should not).

[Unicore]

Word.