So, this is extremely off-topic, but it’s in an OT board, so that’s probably allright. And it’s in a forum where lots of computer-savvy people hang out - certainly more savvy than me - so maybe it’s not such a bad place to post after all.
Dachshund Software (dachshundsoftware.com/index.html) claims to offer rather amazing utilities. Hare will supposedly speed up your computer up to 300%, AntiCrash will prevent crashes, and Zoom will severely speed up shutdowns and startups.
Yeah, yeah, been there done that, there’s tons of “great tools” out there that claim to do lots of stuff. Lots of “accelerating software” that tweak a few setting to make you THINK it’s accelerating. Lots of AntiCrash software that fakes or even creates crashes.
Except…
…except that the website and the FAQ look very professional.
…except that I can’t find any mention of them being a fraud anywhere. No comments anywhere, no one saying a word, no reviews.
…except that as far as I could tell (I’ve been using Hare and AntiCrash on and off for years, without really knowing if it’s doing anything) it rather works, or at least, it doesn’t make anything worse.
So maybe it’s for real.
Except…
…except the site’s out of date for years.
…except that I can’t find any mention of them being miracle-workers anywhere, and if their programs did what they claimed, surely someone would have been saying stuff like “I tried it and it changed my life”, right?
…except some of the utilities, like WinOptimize in Hare and AutoRepair in AntiCrash, look too utopic to be real.
I’ve been wondering about this for years. Does anyone know anything about this company and/or this software? Is it for real? Partially for real? A total fake? If anyone wants to try it out, I can at least guarantee that it’s not spyware, adware or virus. Which is another thing that makes it look half-way real…
I’ve never heard of them. However, I can understand your skepticism — I would automatically disbelieve any company which promised those magical, mostly impossible things. 300%? And it prevents crashes? How? Does it go in like Robin Hood and fix faulty code? How can it do that? How can any program prevent a crash in another program without divining by some ESP what the other program was supposed to be doing rather than what it is actually doing?
The info needed to solve most crashes just isn’t there in the machine – it’s squirrelled away in some programmer’s mind. It’s like, fix this sentence: ‘John dkdmco fifty times to no avail.’ Unless you know what the writer was thinking it’s just not a solvable problem; you could put a supercomputer on it and it would be useless. Same thing goes for buggy, crashy code. So unless I am missing a trick, the claims made by Dachshund are just squarely impossible. This so-called ‘total crash preventer’ is probably just releasing some memory quickly that is usually released by the OS more sluggishly (so about the same effect as quitting your programs and relaunching them from time to time, that’s the best I can see it doing and it’s a trivial advantage since memory leaks only very rarely bring down operating systems, these days).
The website might be professional, but HTML, like talk, is cheap. The promises are so outlandish sounding that I personally wouldn’t give anybody making them the time of day, so I share your ‘something’s fishy’ instinct.
Paul.
P.S. A program that did something truly sophisticated in regards to use of the processor or memory management/crash behaviour, which are kernel-level tasks, would certainly not remain compatible across different Windows iterations (XP, Vista, 7) so if this stuff that was designed for XP still installs and runs without complaint in Vista or Win7, that’d be a huge sign that it’s not really touching any of the low level code that it claims to be touching. If it still runs on a modern OS I’d guess it’s more like a placebo (if not worse).
First thing I do with most any computer is run the Task Manager / Activity Monitor to see what I can kill. For example, the Dashboard on Macs, which, if I need a stock ticker or calculator, I’d run an app. Otherwise it just eats memory. I also disable the root user, ensure the computer doesn’t respond to pings unless it actually supports a given TCP port, shutdown all TCP ports except the very few I actually need, disable sharing, hide the wifi network from casual users, supply the Terminal shell with my usual creature comforts, etc. I have a text file in which I write down all the tweaks I do to my system, so I can re-do them all after a format or some such.
As for Daschund Software, meh. I can’t imagine much they’d do that you couldn’t do yourself with an evening’s worth of net research. Generally, a faster computer has less software, not more.
Thanks!