Anachostic

Today I was out at lunch, eating at the bar and a commercial came on – Finally Fast!  Go to Finally Fast dot com for a free analysis!

This commercial has been around for a long time, and I’ve always known it to be just some sort of ridiculousness.  But I had a thought, what if I did actually run it… on a brand new OS installation?  Could Finally Fast make a brand new computer even faster?

So I set up a fresh fake email account because I know I’m going to have to register for this crap (turns out I didn’t need it).  And I created a clone of a new Windows 8 virtual machine.  Let’s go.

During install, I took a moment to actually read the license agreement.  It scared the hell out of me.  There was lot of text relating to payment, recurring billing, cancellation, and chargebacks.  For example, if you request cancellation of the service, they have 3 days to respond to your request.  If they don’t respond, it’s up to you to request again.  So if you wait until the last day to cancel your “subscription”, you might as well expect it to be too late and you’re going to get charged for another year.

If you try to cancel payment by calling your credit card and cancelling the charge, they will dispute the chargeback and will charge you $500 for “defrauding” them. If you intend to cancel payment through the credit card company, you have to provide Finally Fast with a police report showing that you reported your credit card stolen, since that’s the only acceptable reason for cancelling a charge this way.

If you couldn’t tell this was a scam from the start, and I’m not sure how you couldn’t, it should now be clearly obvious.  If a company threatens its potential customers, you do not want to do business with that company.

So here’s the results of my scan on a brand new install:

64 “Errors”.  Missing shared files (which happen to be all references to the obsolete .NET Framework 1.1) and invalid file extensions for file types that are hardly ever used, like .ARJ.  None of the “errors” are critical.  They won’t make my computer faster.  Clicking Fix Now does what you expect, it opens a web browser to make the sale.  The scan has been scheduled to run every 7 days, which I am confident will present the results and another request for activation.

At this point I’ve lost interest in the application.  You can download a bunch of other applications that do other scans and I wasn’t going there.  My curiosity was satisfied that a new OS install evidently has “errors” that must be fixed by buying an application from a company that expects you are going to defraud them.  And as we all know, what you believe will happen, will happen.