lovehifi's Full Review: Avanquest Fix-It Utilities 9 Professional for PC (...
We have 2 laptops in our home. Both have been running a little slow. One is a Windows XP OS and the other is a VISTA OS.
I periodically delete items such as old emails, temporary files, files from surfing, etc, etc. However, I figured I had uneccessary items in some of the registries.
As much as I don't like VISTA, I do like the Windows Defender program. It works rather well. But it may still not keep out all intruders.
So, I did some research. The Avenquest Fix It Utilities Professional software was rated 2nd best by one magazine (out of 23).
The ads for it sounded great. Anti-virus software plus registry cleaners plus deep defrag programs and so on. Supposedly, the user would see increases in speed of up to 80%.
The ads also spoke of how easy this program is to use.
I found neither of the above to really be very accurate.
I bought it at OfficeMax. That also irked me. OfficeMax offered this software for $19.99 online ($30 0ff reg price). Yet, at the local OfficeMax, I had to pay $29.99, which was their regular price.
I really hate all these retailers for pulling this kind of scam. The in-store employees told me the usual song-and-dance about how internet prices are 'cheaper because there's less overhead'. Yes, yes, that may be true. But why is the internet's regular price $20 higher than the in-store price? That makes no sense, unless the claimed interent's price is also a scam.
This whole internet vs retail pricing is ridiculous and a slap-in-the-face to the public. I can buy the item for less on the internet and pick it up at the store, but God forbid I try to buy it at the store in the first place for the same amount. It's just plain stupid.
The program was a pain to install. Uploading was slow and downloading updates was terribly slow. Uploading of the updates was also terribly slow. This 'slowness' was identical on both my laptops.
Running the programs was slow as well. The Anti-virus program took a good long time to run, maybe over an hour. It found one 'possible' malicious item which I deleted. It took longer to run then the built-in Windows Defender program.
As a footnote, I did stop my Windows Defender program from running and shut off the Internet protection as well, as I understand that having two seperate programs both doing the same job may interfere with one another, thus slowing down the system.
The Defrag was also incredibly slow, taking maybe 1 1/2 hours to run. Again, this was no improvement over the built-in Windows Defrag programming.
I went into the Fix It options and chose to defrag the registries, speed up the Internet surfing and so on, per the claims of each sub-program.
In the end, when I ran either laptop, they seemed to boot up slower and run slower as well.
Pages came up much slower. I think because the Fix It programs were always running in the background.
When I tried to read my emails, I actually had to wait a minute or more before the email page came up.
When I tried surfing the web, pages also took longer to upload.
All the above was true on BOTH laptops.
Both laptops have 80 gig memory and maybe 1600 Ram, plus I added Ram as well. Both laptops have 40 or so gigs of memory left, as well as several hundred mb of Ram remaining. So I know memory is not the factor here.
When I Uninstalled the Fix It software, the laptops seemed to run better. At least there wasn't any programs running in the background all the time. Pages now come up faster then when Fix It was running. The same goes for surfing the Web.
I'm disappointed. Maybe next time I'll look for just a simple registry cleaner tool. No other programs to take up memory, run in the background and slow down the PC. Just a simple registry cleaner that I could run only as needed.
The reason I bought this software, by the way, was because Avenquest claims to offer a 90 MONEY BACK GUARANTEE.
I will call Avenquest Monday to learn how to obtain my refund. If and when I receive it, I will add that to this review.
Honestly, I have yet to find a add-on software package which actually speeds up the PC. They always seem to slow them down.
In any case, I will be returning the Fix It program to Avenquest for a refund. I am not happy with the results.
Defend your PC with integrated anti-virus and anti-spyware tools. Fix-It Utilities finds and prevents problems before they happen.More at TigerDirect.com
Fix-It Utilities 9 Professional gives you five easy-to-use Wizards that allow you to fix, clean, optimize or protect your system or perform a comprehe...More at Amazon Marketplace
Fix-It Utilities 9 Professional gives you five easy-to-use Wizards that allow you to fix, clean, optimize or protect your system or perform a comprehe...More at Amazon
One-Click Performance and Security Wizard Solutions are the answer to your regular PC needs. Choose from the Optimize, CleanUp, FixUp & Security Wizar...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.