Named & Shamed
Keumars Afifi-Sabet puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and misbehaving software
SOFTWARE WARNING!Turbo PC Cleaner Pro’s ads and pop-ups
Microsoft’s eagerly awaited PC Manager is a huge let-down (see Issue 678, page 10), but I’d sooner use it than the hundreds of similar tools riddled with adverts and annoying pop-ups. One example is Turbo PC Cleaner Pro, which actually came top of the list when I searched for ‘PC Manager’ on the Microsoft Store (see screenshot right).
Like all such tools, it claims to be an “all-in-one solution for optimizing and decluttering your computer”. Yet its 3.8 user rating was somehow even lower than the abysmal CCleaner (4.4). Maybe the reviews were unfair, so I installed it to check.
The first thing it did was open Chrome without my permission ( 1in our screenshot far right), then it launched the app itself
2 , followed by a pop-up 3asking me to sign into my Miracle Games Inc account.
Miracle Games – which I’d never heard of – turns out to be the Chinese owner of the app. Its baffling company slogan is ‘Firm attitudes, warm oriented’. And you have to sign up to its suspiciously obscured terms and conditions. I read these but had no idea how thoroughly it would monitor my system, or where my data would end up.
A few moments later another pop-up 4
showed some of the main features – and I would have tried them had I not been driven to distraction by the ads that pestered me when I clicked through the menus. The result of all these messages and pop-ups is the multilayered mess shown in our screenshot above.
I was left exasperated by Turbo PC Cleaner Pro, and astonished that the Microsoft Store has it as its top suggestion. For now, the best PC-cleaning tool remains BleachBit (www.bleachbit.org).
WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT?
WHAT THEY SAY
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