System Mechanic 12 scam

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by roger_m, Sep 17, 2013.

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  1. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2009
    Posts:
    8,627
    I am a registered user of System Mechanic, and lately have been getting "spammed" from Iolo about the forthcoming version 12, telling me how much better it is than v11, and offering me a 50% discount on upgrading, if I was so do so right away. As much as I love a good discount, I wanted to wait till v12 was released so I could try the new version before deciding whether to part with my money. I must point out that I put "spammed" in quotes, as the emails were more definitely not actual spam, as when I gave Iolo my email address I gave them permission to email me, and if I wanted to I could choose to opt out of the receiving the emails.

    Yesterday, I got a pop up notification from System Mechanic informing me that v12 was now available, with a link to upgrade. After carefully examining the link which opened in my browser it became evident that Iolo were doing their best in trying to dupe me into paying for v12, when in fact I did not need to pay for it. Basically since I had a current subscription for System Mechanic, I don't need to actually pay for any updates. The money I would be paying to supposedly upgrade to the new version, would add another year to my subscription. I want to make it very clear that Iolo were trying to make me believe that I needed to pay to upgrade to v12 - something that an honest and trustworthy company would most certainly never do.

    After deciding to not part with my money (and never give any money to these scammers ever again) I launched System Mechanic, and it was able to download and install the new version for me.

    The changes in v12 are listed here.

    I just want to make a few points:
    When I ran a scan with SM, this did supposedly find some problems, and offer to fix them. I say supposedly, as there is no way to find out what the actual problems are. There is always the slight possibility that the problems are made up, and this fixes nothing.

    There's one big problem here - nowhere does Iolo list what these issues are. In fact, I've never seen System Mechanic identify any specific problems with my computer. To be honest, while System Mechanic does a decent job of cleaning up a computer and making it faster, like virtually all system utilities, it can do next to nothing to actually remedy computer problems. For fixing computer problems, Tweaking.com's Windows Repair does an excellent job - and it's free.

    Elsewhere System Mechanic has problems too.

    For example the included driver updater finds two driver updates for my computer. Which would be fine, except that in both cases the "updated" drivers are much older than the drivers I already have installed! My video drivers is from November of 2012, but SM wants to replace it with one released more than two years earlier. But, it gets worse, it wants to replace my network driver with one released more than three years before my current driver!

    I was hoping that the driver updates would be fixed in the new version. Silly me.

    Also, Iolo continues to make highly misleading claims about their product. For example they make claim that it can defrag RAM.
    This certainly sounds impressive, but the truth is that it can't defrag RAM - no software can do this.
     
    Last edited: Sep 17, 2013
  2. guest

    guest Guest

    Well, lol. That sure is a problem. :D
     
  3. Baldrick

    Baldrick Registered Member

    Joined:
    May 11, 2002
    Posts:
    2,674
    Location:
    South Wales, UK
    And you are obviously so annoyed that you missed commenting on the new "Stability Guard" feature. ;)

    What is you view on that?
     
  4. roger_m

    roger_m Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2009
    Posts:
    8,627
    I have no opinion yet, as I have not had a look at it yet.
     
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