Why You No Longer Need Protection and Cleaning Software
In the 1990s, home computers gradually emerged as an everyday concept. As they became more prevalent in the average household, you would have to be on another planet to have never heard of a computer virus. During the Y2K craze, it was thought by many that computer viruses would bring an end to the world. For many business owners and wealthy folks who did not take the protective measures needed to protect their sensitive digital information, this prophecy came true. Their entire lives were set to ruin by the dangers of the viral threats circulating about the new and mysterious world wide web.
By the mid-2000s, just about anyone who owned a computer had some type of antivirus program, and a program that would “clean up” or “optimize” their PC. As an adept PC user at the time, I found these programs to be useful. I noticed the PC would move a bit smoother after running Advanced SystemCare and all the extra little optimization tools included with the software bundle. I felt safe browsing the web with my free version of Avast antivirus. I would have never imagined a world where I did not need these programs on my computer.
By 2015, many users had transitioned to using Windows 10. What I noticed over time, was that Windows Defender was now considered a viable form of Malware Protection. This meant that at some point, AVG, Avast, McAfee, Norton, and all the other forms of Malware protection were technically going to become useless to most home computer users. Almost a decade later, why do they still sell their products? Are we being scammed by the companies that once protected our precious digital possessions?
In 2013, if I serviced a customer’s computer, this often meant installing PC optimization software and malware protection. When I service a customer’s computer today, it is commonplace that I check for third party anti-virus and explain that it is no longer needed, and that Windows Defender is all that is needed for protection. I will offer a side note here; as long as you are not doing anything illegal on your PC, you do not need third party protection. Since I do not support or condone using a PC for illegal activity, I do not recommend third party protection programs.
If you have Windows 10 or Windows 11, and are paying for third party protection, I would recommend you remove these subscriptions, and uninstall these programs. They are simply adding extra bloatware to load at startup, and some of these programs are even less secure than Windows Defender! Don’t believe me? Pull up a chair and do some of your own research. You will find that many users have been continuing to pay for this unnecessary software due to simply being unaware of the changes that have unfolded over time.
What about PC optimization, cleaners, and disk defragmenting software?
The answer to why these are no longer needed, is Solid State technology. For the needs of your everyday operating system user, a solid-state drive is overqualified for the job. If your boot drive is an SSD (It most likely is by now), you have no need for this kind of software, because your system will run just as fast with or without it. In fact, solid state drives are aged by executing written data processes.
For many of these optimization programs, this means your data is being rewritten to be tidier and more organized, but this was only relevant when we were still counting on our spinning hard disk drives to keep us up and running. Every time you run one of these programs on an SSD, you are aging your boot drive for no real benefit. If you want to run a system cleaner once every two years to clean up duplicates and trash files, I can totally vouch for that approach. However, the days of obsessively running optimization software daily are over. Just because the program tells you these files are slowing you down, does not mean your computer is indeed slower than it should be.
Most SSDs have a minimum of 550 MB/S read speed, whereas the average hard drive tends to cruise at a whopping 75 MB/S real time read speed. The new NVME SSDs of today often boast 2,500 to 7,000 MB/S read speed, and those are becoming common in everyday desktops and laptops. The Windows operating system tends to run fast (including all other programs running in the background and foreground) with about 220 MB/S of available disk read speed, based on my various tests over the years. This means that you are only using half of what the cheapest SSD is capable of. This is why hard drives are so visibly slow as boot drives today, and the reason we needed extra help from software to optimize their performance.
So, the answer to the question, “Do I need to clean up my PC?” Once every two years is plenty, folks!
Make sure to remove those third party antivirus programs; they are not doing you any favors. If you would like me to inspect your computer to make sure you don’t have any bloatware or otherwise unnecessary programs, or if you are unsure whether you have an SSD or an HDD, feel free to contact me with your inquiry.