Jonathan Takiff: An online PC tune-up brings scans, tweaks & trail of expense

The Gizmo:

Computer-cleanup services from Norton

Danger, danger: "Hmmm, that sounds really bad," tsk-tsked one of the repair "Geeks" at my neighborhood Best Buy store. I'd just described my PC's sluggish response time and a very scary "jet engine taking off" sound that the computer's fan was making, every time I touched a key.

"Your microprocessor is running too hot, triggering the fan," appraised The Geek.

"Maybe you've got a lot of dust in there." (Nah, I'd checked that out already.) "Otherwise, we're probably looking at replacing the main circuit board. You might just be better off replacing the computer."

Ouch. If this wasn't a three-year-old, high end HP Pavilion PC that I drive only on weekends, maybe I'd have been more amenable to the suggestion. But this time, I decided to first explore an online diagnostic and "tune-up" service for the PC. My hope was that the damage was strictly in software, might be correctable with a cleansing of my hard drive, elimination of unneeded programs and maybe the updating of software drivers.

Where to go: I've been pitched on a few of these online PC repair services in recent months - maybe a sign of the recessionary times and the "fix it, don't ditch it" mindset.

After weighing options, I felt safest handing my PC over to Symantec, developers of the very popular Norton suite of Internet security products, who've recently jumped into the online repair biz.

Leave the driving to them: The Norton Premium Services team is now waiting for your call (24x7) at 1-800-917-9152. After steering your PC to their Web site and OKing a takeover, you sit back and watch the screen, as the service tech remotely combs through your system, looking for trouble and working some magic. You're also hanging together on the phone, so it's good to have one of those lightweight headsets plugged in and on your noggin for the duration.

Don't have a clue what's making your computer go haywire? The Norton rep will suggest you start with a PC Checkup service ($29.99). That operation identifies performance problems and gives you a custom PC report card, but doesn't really start to fix things. It shows how many files are starting up, how bogged down your processor is. It also does a scan to see if your PC is infected and scans to see if you have an anti-virus product.

My computer was in such serious trouble, said Norton rep Alan Avery, that I now needed a Virus Spywear Removal Service, costing $99, largely to attack junk in my PC's Windows registry. That's a repository that accumulates obsolete and nonfunctioning entries and tracking "cookies" that pile on every time you use a piece of software, attach or remove a piece of hardware, or visit a site.

Yes, there are lots of PC-cleaner programs out there that will perform the same function. Some even claim to be "free" - but usually that's just for the first scan that only washes away (intentionally) a small percentage of the footprints.

After a very long scan process, Avery showed me that I had more than 1,200 of these useless files in my registry, mucking up the works! More importantly, he had the eye and expertise to identify the handful of files that I should keep, and the vast majority that I'd never miss at all. That's where I'd have surely been stymied, if I'd tried to do the cleanup job unaided.

If your primary issue is "sluggish performance," the leading complaint heard on the Symantec help line, you can start with the Norton PC-Tune Service which goes for $69.99. Here, the tech runs through a long checklist of steps - 23 for a PC running Windows XP, more for a Vista machine - to make the machine run faster and easier.

Some of the steps are "proprietary secrets" that Avery didn't want to share. But I did note how he went after temp files - including stuff I'd thrown into the computer's garbage can. Avery resized the storage capacity of that bin from 10 percent down to 3 percent of my 120 GB hard drive space. "It'll still be enough to recall a movie, if you've accidentally thrown it away."

He also cleaned up my system tray - those icons (and the programs behind them) that automatically start up when you turn on the computer. "Everybody wants to advertise their logo and program on your screen, but when you really need a Java or Quicktime update you'll get an on-screen notification."

Avery checked the size of my cache - the operative theme again being "less is more." And he shut off the remote registry and indexing features "which make the computer drive grind and grind. Yes, it makes it a little faster when you do a search, but slows down the system the rest of the time."

Oh, and he also set up an onscreen icon/link for me to easily "defrag" my hard drive, compacting its contents. Just one movie editing project had been sprinkled to more than one thousand disk file locations, making the machine "go fetch" like crazy.

But wait, there's more: After a couple hours of Avery's time and effort, the computer was running faster and the fan blowing at lower speed, so I bid the guy adieu. But then a couple of days later, I was feeling a little bit of buyer's remorse. Web surfing again, the fan noise was still a bit annoying, in a sometimes revving- up fashion. So I made another call to the repair center. You can re-connect as often as you want, in the one week after you purchased a service.

This time, I was persuaded to trade up from my weighty Norton 360 anti-virus/anti-spam/anti-phishing, etc. software to the just-out Norton Internet Security 2009. The new software cost $69.99 and the expert installation was $39.99. Had I bought the install and a PC Tune-up at the same time, bundled as "Jump Start," I could have had both for $109.

Norton's new Internet Security 2009 doesn't offer (as had 360) online-backup and a PC tune-up feature which hadn't worked well on my machine, anyway.

But the 2009 program is a real leap forward from its predecessors, said Avery. "It represents the culmination of a several-year project to make a program that is much faster and lighter, that doesn't tax your computer nearly as much."

The proof was immediately evident after this software swap. My PC now jumped to attention in a blink. And whispered like a baby. Come to papa! *