The One With Aldacron

In the comments section of my ever-popular RegCure Key Morons post, it’s rare to get a comment from a legitimate user of the software. But recently, an unhappy user did leave a comment complaining about an error he had when trying to use it and wondering what good it is. I replied with what I hoped was a helpful answer. He was nice enough to come back to the thread and continue the conversation.

I started to write a new reply to his latest comment, but it got rather long. The subject matter also makes for a good bit of general advice for buying software online and highlights some of the issues faced by those with less experience at this. For context, here’s the comment, from Gary, that sparked this post:

if RegCure is realy a good program, why is it impossible to contact them directly? when i try i get the sales pitch, not a customer service response. i can’t even get a response asking “what does it do and how do i use it”. after purchase i had to “run scan” 2 times to learn how to get it to clean my software, and still don’t know what it does for me. should i just “take it on faith” that it is doing something “good” for me? why are there so many “don’t buy, this is a rip-off” on the internet”? being new to this, i just wanted my “probaby dumb” questions answered. dealing with dell is a pain and takes forever to get results. they can correct my problems, but won’t say why i have a problem. thanks for talking to me

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Tip #1: If you don’t understand what a particular piece of software does, don’t buy it.

Gary said: after purchase i had to “run scan” 2 times to learn how to get it to clean my software, and still don’t know what it does for me.

The internet is full of malicious software and people selling software that doesn’t work as advertised. When you don’t understand what a piece of software does, then you aren’t going to be able to recognize when it is doing something it isn’t supposed to do or when isn’t doing something it is supposed to do. When considering whether or not to buy a piece of software, there are two areas you should be looking for on the product website: Features and FAQ.

The Features section should be your first stop. Nearly all product pages will have a section on the front page with a bullet list of features. What you really want to see is another page that explains the features in more detail. On the main page, if you don’t see a menu containing a ‘Features’ link, or something similar, that should raise a yellow flag. Bulleted feature lists are intended to pique your interest and tell you what the product does in a nutshell. For some people, that’s enough. But some people don’t understand the terminology used, or they want to know more details about how the software operates. Any product worth its salt will have a ‘Features’ page giving those details.

The FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions, section is great for supplemental information. Some companies pull questions out of the air for their FAQs, but many of them post legitimate customer questions and their common responses. Traditionally, FAQs were aimed at both potential customers and actual customers, but these days many companies split them up. When you see a FAQ link on the product home page, it is usually aimed at potential customers. The FAQ for existing customers is usually called the ‘Knowledge Base’ these days and can be found in the Support section.

Let’s look at the RegCure home page. In the bottom left, there is a bulleted features list. The first feature listed is ‘Back-up Registry.’ For someone who has no idea what a Registry is, that’s not very useful. Fortunately, the menu bar in the upper right contains a link to a Features page. There, you can find a couple of product blurbs followed by a section titled, Getting to Know Your Registry. That explains what the registry is and why it needs to be cleaned periodically. Below that is an explanation of every sort of item RegCure looks for and removes.

The main page also has a FAQ link. By itself, the RegCure FAQ isn’t all that useful. There are a few items that give a bit more understanding about the product, but more importantly there is a link to a RegCure Whitepaper. This is a 426kb PDF file that explains the software in more detail.

So anytime someone recommends a piece of software to you, or you stumble upon it by accident, and you don’t know what it is or what it does, the first thing you should be looking for is a Features page and then a FAQ. If you can’t find those, Google the product name coupled with ‘reviews’, e.g., RegCure reviews. Many software review sites will often have articles that explain the software in varying amounts of detail. That can help give you a better idea of what the software is. But that brings us to the next tip:

Tip #2: Read product reviews with a critical eye.

Gary said: why are there so many “don’t buy, this is a rip-off” on the internet”?

This is a point I can’t stress enough: a great many product reviews are pure garbage. There are an incredible number of product reviews out there written by people who were completely frustrated with the product when they wrote the review. I can almost guarantee you that in many cases the problem was user-error and not a fault of the product itself. This is especially true with software.

One problem is that the majority of computer users do not understand how the software they use interacts with their operating system, don’t understand the software’s domain, nor are they aware of many of the options available to them. Unfortunately, the software they use is designed by people who do understand these things. Sometimes, software developers make the mistake of assuming too much about their end users. When the developers don’t go the extra mile to make the software more accessible to the average Joe, the end result is that there are a great many frustrated Joes out there.

Another problem is that the average customer is, generally speaking, notoriously impatient. How many times have you purchased a new piece of software, installed it, and jumped right in to using it? When software is purchased in a retail store, a printed manual usually accompanies the disk. Software distributed digitally often comes with a manual in one document format or another (usually RTF, DOC, PDF, or TXT), has a detailed help system accessible via the menu, or has documentation available online. Software users were already notoriously bad about reading printed manuals, so with the age of digital distribution upon us it really is no surprise that many users aren’t at all aware that a manual was copied to their hard drive during the installation process.

Whatever the reason, a lot of reviews out there are just people writing in a fit of anger, indiscriminately blaming the software for their woes. So you need to read reviews with a critical eye. There are a couple things to look for:

How much depth does the review have? You can outright reject simple one-liners (”X sucks!”) or reviews that are nothing more than angry diatribes, heavy on ranting and light on details. In general, you’ll find that the majority of positive reviews tend to be more considered and thought out, whereas the majority of negative reviews do not. Whether positive or negative, the reviews you should pay attention to are those that tell you why something is good or bad, those that give a bit of detail into the reviewer’s experience with the product. You should also look for people who obviously don’t understand the domain, but if you don’t understand it either that’s a bit hard to do!

Where did you read the review? There are a great many web sites out there geared toward reviewing and discussing nearly every form of software in existence: games, office suites, operating systems, system tools… you name it, there’s a site for it somewhere. It can sometimes be difficult to determine which of these sites are bogus and which are legitimate and know what they’re on about. You can’t really judge by the size of the site either, as there are some great specialty sites out there, tightly focused, with a niche readership. But if you’ve found a review on some random message board, a newsgroup, IRC, a generic download site, or any site not specifically geared toward writing software reviews (i.e. a review from a random internet user), then treat it with extreme negative bias. An article on a software review site, written not by a random user but actually published by that site, should carry more weight.

The most important thing, though, is to find as many reviews as you can that you judge to be credible. Use Google, as suggested above, to find reviews at software review sites. Visit commerce sites, such as Amazon.com, to find what people who have purchased the software have to say about it. Don’t bother reading the testimonials that are inevitably printed on the product home page. While they are often genuine, the companies certainly aren’t going to print any negative comments on their own site. And some actually will make them up.

From my own perspective, RegCure works as advertised. The first time I ran it, there were a few thousand useless entries discovered in my registry. All of them were safely removed without anything being affected negatively. Since that time, I have run it regularly every two months or so. Whenever errors have been found, they have been safely removed each time. It’s also quite fast. It has to search not only the registry, but also the hard drive in order to verify that certain registry keys point to valid locations on disk. It does so very efficiently. I’ve never found myself wishing it would go faster.

Tip #3: Try before you buy!

This tip is tightly coupled with Tip #1 above. Most digitally distributed software has some form of evaluation version, often called a ‘demo.’ Often, such versions are ‘crippled’ in some way. Some are usable only for a limited time, some have restricted features, some are a combination of both. The point of demo software from a potential buyer’s perspective is to get a taste of what the full version does so that they can make a more informed decision about purchasing it. The developer’s goal is to impress you and convince you to buy. It’s a mutually beneficial version of the software.

In the case of RegCure, you’ll find several links for a ‘Free Scan’ throughout the product site. This is a link to the demo version, which will scan your computer just as efficiently as the full version. The difference is that the demo version does not remove the offending registry entries. The purpose is to show you that RegCure is fast and can detect many types of invalid registry entries. If you like what you see, you can then purchase it and clean up your registry on a regular basis.

Tip #4: Some sites put customer support contact information several layers deep.

Gary said: if RegCure is realy a good program, why is it impossible to contact them directly? when i try i get the sales pitch, not a customer service response. i can’t even get a response asking “what does it do and how do i use it”.

Some companies these days put customer support contact info a few pages deep into the site. Often, when you click on a support link you are taken to a knowledge base. There’s a reason for this. There are certain questions that are asked again and again and again and again. Often, these are very basic questions that result from a lack of knowledge about the product. This can be a tremendous drain on resources, as customers with more pressing problems often have to wait in a long line, with many customers who have trivial issues in front of them. If customers could read the knowledge base first, they will often find the answers to their questions.

So when you click on a support link and find yourself on a knowledge base page, you may need to do some digging around to find the customer support contact info. Sometimes it’s on a menu bar on the knowledge base page. Sometime you actually have to search the knowledge base first. Sometimes you have to create an account first. Every company has different policies, so it’s hard to give a one-size-fits-all rule here. But, in general, if the contact info is not immediately visible, some digging around will usually lead you to it.

In this case, clicking RegCure’s support link takes you to a page that has two prominent links in the same paragraph, one for the knowledge base and one for support registration. There is also a text box on the page that allows you to immediately search the knowledge base. Clicking the first link shows a solitary category in the knowledge base: Regcure. Clicking that, there are three more categories. The first would be the place for potential buyers to go: Regcure Pre-Sales. Clicking that link takes us to a page with several frequently asked questions from potential buyers.

If you register for support, you can then login and are presented with a contact form. Using this form, you can ask the RegCure support team any question you want.

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While some may view these tips as common sense, they are not immediately obvious to someone new to the internet or new to shopping for software online. I hope that Gary, at least, finds them helpful.

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