A few weeks ago I received an email from a Technical Writer at Windsty.com asking me to link to their Windows 7 Tune Up Suite in return for a full license to their product. I wrote back and told them that I would not simply link to their product, but I was willing to give it an honest review. I’m offering this full disclaimer, but as you read on, you’ll see their license didn’t result in a glowing review.
If you want to see what the software claims to do, just do a search for Windsty and you will see page after page after page of sites that either simply link to the site or have posted material directly from the web site. Even CNet doesn’t actually review the software and has taken the easy way out by posting the company line.
I ran the software on a 3 year old Dell Dimension E520 that was BADLY in need of some tender loving care. Over the three years, I’ve installed and uninstalled literally hundreds of programs. As of this writing, I have 128 programs in my Programs directory.
The first thing I did was back up EVERYTHING including the registry. The registry backup was actually unnecessary, because Windsty will do it for you.
The machine takes just a little over 5 minutes to boot and I figured that boot time was about the best benchmark I could use. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that after I finished running the most of the suite, my boot time improved by about 15%. It was an improvement, but not overly impressive.
I have Comcast, which offers Norton’s virus and malware protection along with some light duty clean up tools. I ran Norton’s Registry Clean Up. I found and corrected 54 errors. Then I ran Windsty’s cleanup and it came up with an additional 3,511 errors. That was interesting to say the least. In glancing over the errors, many were entries which led to impressive numbers, but had little impact on load speed.
I cleaned up my temp files and emptied the trash manually and then I ran their junk file clean up utility. It came up with 2130 junk files, which I deleted in order to free up drive space. It turned out that some of the junk files were junk to them, but not to me.
I didn’t run their duplicate file finder, because I make a lot of presentations that have duplicate files. The average user could probably save considerable disk space, but at least 20% of my hard drive space is taken up by necessary duplicates. Deleting them would cause a lot of problems.
So far I didn’t have any real problems or complaints. It was my hope that their Start Up Manager would be the key to getting increased performance. I had used two different Start Up Managers in the past with mixed results. This would be my first disappointment which led to more.
Up to this point, I was comfortable enough to use the utilities without having to refer to documentation or help files, but their Start Up Manager wasn’t as user friendly as I had hoped. I didn’t see how I could order or delay the programs. Since messing around with start up can be a lot trickier than cleaning junk files, I decided to head to the help files only to find THERE WERE NONE.
My only option for finding help through the Help menu was to go to their web site and fill out the web form at their support page. There is only one problem with that. I got NO response at all from the company. I waited three days and sent another message with the same results.
After further investigation, I found that there was no phone number and no email address for contacting the company.
What’s even more interesting is that between my first and second tech support request, I received ANOTHER request from ANOTHER technical writer for Windsty to do exactly what I was already doing. Coupled with the lack of documentation, help files, and tech support, this had me wondering about the legitimacy of the company and their customer support.
Then just this morning, I received another request from a different utility company to add a link to their product to my blog. I did some quick checking to see if I there were ties between the two companies, but came up with nothing, but it appears to be a marketing ploy to use the blogsphere to promote products through questionable social networking practices.
I try to keep my word. I agreed to
link to their tune up suite and review it in return for the license, but I'm not going to endorse the product. To me, the most important features of ANY software are the help files and technical support. Unless I missed something, Windsty is devoid of both. If someone from Windsty contacts me with different information or if I hear back from their tech support, I’ll write a follow up to this blog. Under those conditions, there is no way I can recommend it.
