OptimizerRX - A cautionary tale

Anybody had any experience of OptimizerRX from Horizon DataSys? On a whim, I downloaded the demo last night and installed it. I selected the 'Scan' option and away it went.

Being a demo of cleanup software, I sort of expected it to come back after the scan and report that I'd got 10,000 useless registry entries and orphaned shortcuts etc etc and if I wanted them fixed then I'd have to pay them money.

Not so. It was running through the registry etc stating that it was deleting this, that....and the other. I kept thinking that I was at least going to get a check list at some point to authorise the deletions. Nope. It went on to delete some 1.6GB of data from my drive, according to its calculations. Even files placed on the desktop were disappearing.

You might think that I was a bit relaxed about this, but I was happy in the thought that I had a good backup image and that I'd also got Rollback installed which, I hoped, was at least compatible with OptimizerRX.

When I returned to the PC after some time, I discovered that OptimizerRX had crashed but its final on-screen message seemed to confirm that it had indeed deleted 1.6GB of data. I didn't really think that I had that much junk, but maybe.

Anyway, I rebooted the PC and it obviously thought that I didn't need all those system files cluttering up my root directory as it had left it in a non-booting state. Fortunately, Rollback did save the day. I selected the snapshot prior to the madness that seems to be OptimizerRX and rebooted. Everything was back as it should be .

So, I'm not trying to give the software a bad press, I would simply suggest that you expect the unexpected if you do try it out!

Graham

 

LOL.

I'll try this thing... In a VM... To see how exactly it optimizes.

I'll report back.

Cheers.

 

I ran it without issues, did you update it before scan your computer?

 

I didn't update the first time I tried it but, in the interests of science, I've just tried it again. This time I updated and this time it got to a total of 14GB of data that it said it had deleted before I chickened out and aborted the scan.

I did contact Horizon Datasys as I noticed that it didn't mention Vista compatability (I'm using Vista Ultimate) but they said that it just wouldn't be optimised for Vista but that it should run ok. The also confirmed that it was compatible with Rollback which, incidentally, worked perfectly after the PC had become non-bootable again.

I guess I'll put this one down to experience now .

Graham