PC optimizers are not a new concept, and they have been around for quite a while. Nowadays, many consider them unnecessary, but having an official program made by Microsoft that is capable of (allegedly) speeding up your PC may sound quite appealing.

However, Microsoft’s PC Manager has already raised quite a few eyebrows when customers caught it recommending some questionable optimizing techniques, injecting affiliate links, and shamelessly claiming your PC needs repair if Bing is not set as the default search engine. Yikes.

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    6 months ago

    When Oxygen Not Included was purchased by Tencent, they added some data-mining functionality (as far as I know, opt-in for in-game content, so not the worst, but still). I’d have been less-willing to buy a copy if I’d known that it’d wind up down the road having that happen to it.

    I’m a little concerned about the broader prospect of software from one entity being sold to someone, then down the line, that entity going under, and in an always-online world, being a conduit for new updates with less-desirable software with the access granted the earlier one. This wasn’t historically a problem when software was sold offline on physical media.

    For Android, at least there’s some level of app isolation, but on the PC, apps aren’t isolated.