By Mark W Swarbrick
PC Matic is made by PC Pitstop and has made its name known through TV commercials that promote their product as an American made antivirus/tune-up program that supposedly is better than any other product. Their commercial says, “PC Matic with SuperShield makes sure you never get another virus again!” Is it true? Is PC Matic a good product?
While PC Matic can catch viruses and may make an infected computer run better, their claim is misleading. There is no antivirus that will catch 100 percent of all viruses. There are new viruses released every day and it is impossible to guarantee a computer won’t ever get infected.
Marketing Malware
But over-the-top advertising claims are the least of PC Pitstop’s problems. The company has a rather soiled past. They began in 1999 by manufacturing a number of PUPS that were pure snake oil – Programs that promised to help tune your computer in some way. Many of these programs did nothing helpful and sometimes made things worse. Registry cleaning and driver updating are examples of poor practices that have found their way into PC Matic. Its common knowledge in the IT community that these functions should never be done as regular maintenance and doing so can cause catastrophic operating system failure.
Even more insidious, often PC Pitstop’s programs came as trial versions that were piggy-backed on top of other programs, thus ending up installed on computers without the knowledge or permission of the owner. Programs that sneak onto your computer without your knowledge are a type of malware known as PUPS, which stands for Possibly Unwanted Programs. Since they are not technically viruses, they may not be detected by your antivirus. Nevertheless, get a few of these snake oil programs installed and the computer can slow down and have problems as badly as if it did have a virus. PUPS are the most prevalent form of malware encountered by IT professionals.
Many people have complained that they don’t know how PC Matic got on their computer in the first place. Once PC Matic is installed on a computer, whether intentionally or unintentionally, it launches a scan of your system, finds numerous problems (even on new-out-of-the-box computers) and then offers to fix the issues if you pay them fifty bucks. Malwarebyes, a respected name in the IT world, began detecting PC Matic as a PUP. Consequently PC Matic heeded the advice from engineers at Malwarebytes and changed some of PC Matic’s features in order to avoid being labeled a PUP.
Many of the issues reported by PC Matic as harmful have been demonstrated to be benign. But reporting a list of problems to fix can make the program appear powerful and helpful. The user has no idea they are being lied to and they fork over the fifty dollars to enable the cleaning function. Such tactics have caused IT professionals to label PC Matic as scareware.
Reputable antivirus companies first hire expert IT security professionals, make the best product they can with the goal in mind of getting a high rating of VB100 from independent testing from places such as Virus Bulletin. This is where PC techs look to determine which products are reliable. They get the word out to their customers and those companies meet with success.
PC Pitstop took a different tact. They began by sneaking their wares onto computers by secretly bundling them with free games, screensavers and other frequently downloaded products. Then they launched a nation-wide TV commercial campaign that broadcast misrepresentations of their product. The product itself is poorly written, often spawning error messages upon install. Misspellings in the software’s reports and the unprofessional interface are indicative of a program that is poorly coded
PC Matic Failed Independent Testing
Virus Bulletin has tested PC Matic and it only passed one out of twelve tests. Worse yet, it detected 13,753 false positives! Nearly fourteen thousand legitimate programs detected as viruses! Virus Bulletin reported that it had problems with system stability on computers running PC Matic. They reported, “There were some fairly severe stability issues (with PC Matic) on Windows 10, with a number of blue screens cropping up through the tests and giving the team some extra work to do…”[1]
Problematic PC Matic
PC Matic has been reported to delete Restore Points, a particularly egregious action, for Windows Restore Points are needed to repair a computer that will not boot up. It also updates hardware drivers which is a dangerous thing to do. Unless a piece of hardware is exhibiting a specific problem, you should normally not update a hardware driver. Nevertheless, for a long-time now unscrupulous companies have sold driver updater programs that do more harm than good and PC Matic is among them. It has also been noted that PC Matic relies heavily on the Windows Scripting Shell and its been known to leave a wscript.exe thread open constantly that can run high CPU and RAM usage causing the thread to crash. There are a plethora of reports of PC Matic deleting or disabling programs that are not harmful in any way.
So what about people that say they run PC Matic with no problem, or say that their computer runs much better since they installed it? Yes, PC Matic can help an infected computer. It does detect viruses. But it is not the best and it has been known to cause problems and the company has used unscrupulous distribution methods in the past.
In short, PC Matic is more hype than help. Think about this: One of the important functions of an antivirus is to look for PUPS. So why would anyone want to trust PC Matic, which is a PUP, to look for other PUPS?
Here are some links to other articles on PC Matic.
[1] https://www.virusbulletin.com/virusbulletin/2016/08/vb100-comparative-review/\