Finally Fast                  August 24, 2008

While watching "Attack of the Show" on G4, I saw an advertisement for finallyfast.com, a site that is supposed to help speed up your PC. They state that they can make any computer run faster. Most of the computers in their advertisement are Macs, but in the fine print on the ad, they say they only fix PCs. Well, as walterbiscardi pointed out, PC is a term that stands for Personal Computer. Personal computers are computers – generally speaking – that are used in a home. That means that Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac, and a slew of other operating systems qualify as PC operating systems (PC OSs).

Well, I decided to put this application to the test. I went to finallyfast.com, and downloaded SpeedScan, one of the applications that they offer, that is supposed to check your internet performance, (it doesn't fix anything. You gotta pay for that feature.), and installed this application. I know what you're thinking -- “if you don't trust their application, or are at least skeptical of their claims, why on earth would you INSTALL this?” Well, good question. The answer is simple. I don't run a M$ operating system in my house. I have Kubuntu Hardy Herin (a Debain-based version of Linux). The next (and obvious question) is this: How do you run an application that has been written for Windows on Linux? WINE. Wine is a windows compatability layer for Linux. It's not an emulator, it's a collection of libraries that allow you to run windows applications nativly in Linux.

Now, before I ran their setup application, I verified that my wine install folder was a fresh install (that I had never used it, so it was starting from scratch). I then ran the application by running this command

# wine Desktop/SpeedScan_setup.exe

It brought up their installer screen, and had me accept their TOS (Terms of Service), and copyright. Like most users, I know that you can't get what you want without agreeing to these, so I just clicked on “I accept” and proceeded to the install. At the end, it crashed (I guess it's not really PC compatable, just windows compatable), but that's ok. The install worked fine. It just wouldn't run. I got what I wanted.

Well, the next part of the test was the hardest. I needed an application that I could run that wouldn't install. I needed to ensure that whatever I ran would generate a wine install exactly the same as a base-install of wine (when I say install, I mean it generates the .wine folder in my home folder “/home/USERNAME/.wine”). I decided on using HJ-Split a great free – as in beer – file splitter and joiner. The great thing about this is it doesn't requre an install. It just runs.

Before running hjsplit, I moved my wine folder “/home/USER/.wine/” to “/home/USER/old_wine/”. I did this so wine would be forced to create a new folder. This is for comparison reasons, which I will get into shortly. I then ran hjsplit, then closed it. I then opened each wine folder (“/home/USER/.wine/” and “/home/USER/old_wine/”), and compared the windows folders (“/home///drive_c/windows”> and compared their contents. Now, I need to explain the reason. Your windows folder is for system files. NO application, aside from drivers, and a few select anti-virus programs should add files to the windows folder. An application that does, without your knowledge is usually questionable at best, disaterous at worst.

The results were suprising. A clean WINE windows folder contains 3,285,906 bytes of data, and the windows folder that was created for finallyfast.com was 4,705,238 bytes. That's a difference of 1,419,332 bytes. That's about 1.36MB in difference. Quite a difference, considering it shouldn't have installed ANYTHING into the windows folder (it also has a folder in the Program Files folder, with a size of 5.1MB).

After comparing the files, these are the files and folders it installs into the windows folder:

• Windows
  • bf49_pcspeedscan.0.xpm
  • 82c6_apcmain.xpm
  • System32
    • ConTest.dll
    • ascbalon.dll
    • ConTest.dll
    • mscomctl.ocx
    • SysRestore.dll

It also had 2 install folders (no idea why).

So, my question: Why would a simple speed test requre you to install all these DLLs? Some even look like valid M$ dlls (I'm betting that's what they want you to think), but they sure weren't there before.

My final thought: Don't use this site. At best, they are questionable. I hope you find this post helpful.