Day One Hundred fifty-five: Evening of January 4th 2010

So on yesterday’s post I stated that I would get the name of the registry optimizer for today’s entry. Little did I realize that I bought into a controversy when I purchased Advanced Registry Optimizer by SammSoft.

In order to find this out, I had to check the path of the icon back to the actual application, which I found a bit of a bother. After checking out the title of the software on my Toshiba netbook, I decided to look up the review on cnet.com. It was during the search process that I notice one of the Google hits had the word “spam” tacked onto the name of the application. Whoa! Brakes screeching. What was that all about? I clicked on that link, started reading the text and became totally confused. It seemed like the page was a set of ads for other software. At the bottom of the page was a set of references that had selected/edited comments followed by more link after the entry. I was uncertain about what the intro comments were trying to communicate. Some actually had a negative bent, and other hedged their bet by sounding like ‘well maybe’ statements. I didn’t bother to click on any of the links, because I wanted to hit the cnet.com review to see where I went wrong.

The first thing I noticed was that I’ll have to update to version 5.1 of ARO. Then I reread the review, noting the cnet.com editor’s four stars out of five rating. That had not changed, but the user reviews had dipped below three out of five. So I continued to read. The one star reviews range from application flaw evaluations to enraged claims of the cnet.com editors being in the pocket of SammSoft. I think one five star review was a lead to a source of a ‘free’ full version, which sounded questionable. There was one poor review that claimed that the registry cleaning actually broke registry links to software, which has happened to me. However you can customize the software to address this issue, but it was a time consuming operation to actually find the applications link and mark it as a ‘skip’ link. Another individual commented on the poor customer support, but I didn’t bother to seek out kindred spirits in the 200 plus comment. A few others noted the fact that the company offered a free version but it only tagged the first twenty registry errors, and you had to pay for the full version. This elicited comment about phony hits, and how can you be sure. A downward spiral became apparent.

The scary thing that I noted was that there wasn’t a response by a company representative or a cnet.com editor. I’ll have to hit the ‘See all’ link and check if any responses by either group are buried in the user reviews.

Then again, maybe I won’t. The application, as a part of a periodic maintenance system, seems to keep the system running well.

As an addendum, I think there was a piece of SammSoft software that I had a long time ago for my Mac 512e that worked. I wonder if I can find it. If memory serves me correctly, it was a memory management application-squeezing a few extra kilobytes of RAM out of the system.