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Cash for SpeedPrograms that offer to boost your computer's performance are mostly bogus.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Monday, March 9, 2009, at 6:03 PM ET

The guy in the ad for My Faster PC clearly doesn't know much about computers. For starters, his go-to search engine is called Boggle, displayed in oddly familiar red, yellow, blue, and green letters. Plus, he's searching for a URL—"MY FASTER PC.COM"—which he should have entered (sans spaces) in his Web browser's address bar, not Boggle. On top of his ineptitude, his "darn computer" is slow as mud and constantly crashing. And to make matters worse, he's got an annoyingly inquisitive wife who keeps pestering him for updates about what he's doing. No wonder the guy's willing to shell out $30 for an instant fix.

Our man is in luck. As soon as he runs My Faster PC, everything changes. The software transforms his computer so thoroughly that he and his desk suddenly begin to hurtle through some kind of space warp. "Did it work?" the wife wants to know. The guy is bowled over: "Oh yeah."

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We've all been in Mr. My Faster PC's place before: After a few years, your PC has ground to a halt, loading programs and Web pages slothfully and freezing at the slightest provocation. My Faster PC is one of dozens of programs that promise to fix all that by cleaning your computer of all the junk that's collected over the years. It's a particularly cunning metaphor. We're used to other types of machines getting dirty and needing a tune-up from time to time; you wouldn't throw away your car, oven, or vacuum cleaner just because it collected a little dirt. Are computers any different?

Don't fall for it. Among Windows experts, there's a lot of controversy over whether computers need to be regularly "cleaned" in order to keep them running well. (As far as I can tell, there aren't many such discussions among Mac or Linux enthusiasts, though that doesn't mean those systems always stay pristine.) But if cleaning your PC feels like something you should do, buying expensive programs that are advertised infomercial-style isn't the best way to go about it. Learn it from me: The other day I bit the bullet and bought a copy of My Faster PC. It was a particularly scammy process. In addition to the $29.95 program, the site's checkout menu had pre-enrolled me into paying for "extended download service," a $6.95 option that allowed me to download the software again if I ever lose it—something most software I've bought online offers for free so long as you hang on to your e-mail confirmation. Plus, it turned out that I was not actually buying the software but leasing it. My $30 covered a year's use of My Faster PC, and unless I canceled it, my credit card would automatically be charged annually to extend the service.

What a con. In its ad copy, My Faster PC promises several different services, including tools to defragment your hard drive, clean up unwanted files, review which programs are set to start with your computer, and check your machine for updates. All of these services come baked into Windows already. Of course, there may be better defragmentation and scanning tools than those made by Microsoft, but My Faster PC doesn't ship with these; instead, it seems to load up Windows' own native tools. That $30 saved just a few clicks on the start menu.

The main new thing you're buying with My Faster PC, then, is something called a "registry cleaner." This refers to the Windows registry, the database at the center of Microsoft's operating systems that tracks settings for hardware and software on your computer. (Microsoft used to offer its own registry cleaner but no longer supports it.) As programs like My Faster PC describe it, the Windows registry is kind of like your car's air filter—after installing and removing programs over months and years, the registry becomes stuffed with digital grime. "This junk can cause crashes, errors, and general slowness," says the Web site of Registry Defender, the cleaning program that ships with My Faster PC. It adds this dreamy promise: "Remember when your computer was new? You didn't have to worry about errors and crashes. Registry Defender can help you bring back that new computer feel."

When I scanned my few-years-old Windows XP machine, My Faster PC found that I had more than 530 registry errors that needed fixing and handily offered to fix them. Here I hesitated. I had read a few scary-sounding warnings online about registry cleaners. These apps search the registry for settings that look like they can be deleted without any trouble—duplicate entries or settings that apply to programs that you've uninstalled, for example. To understand the danger in this approach, imagine that you hire a maid to clean up your antique closet. How would the maid tell the difference between a genuine keepsake and a piece of junk? Registry cleaners face the same dilemma. They may decide that some line of your registry is garbage when in fact it's keeping vital parts of your system alive. (Be sure to back up your Windows registry before running a registry cleaner.)

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

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