You are absolutely right about it being a good example of a social engineered scheme that preys on the ignorance of recent Mac converts.
I would not agree that Macs are as susceptible to EXPLOITS as other platforms. . . there is a difference and that was the crux of our discussion. . . not vulnerabilities.
Sludge files are a good term for files that are left behind by incomplete uninstalls of software. . . and that happens all too often on Windows. Look around after you do an uninstall of Norton on a Windows computer and see what their uninstaller leaves behind, orphan files everywhere. Same thing in the Registry. Sludge. Is it fair to lay that at feet of Microsoft? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the messy architecture that allows placing pieces of apps everywhere and anywhere on the system permits it. It IS getting better but deleting an App should delete ALL of the App. If it leaves remnants, ghosts of apps past, that's sludge. Wouldn't you agree?
I am not posting "Microsoft is evil" tripe, but the kind of thing ex-Windows users remember and want to avoid that the MacKeeper advertisers are targeting with fear tactics.
I know that Windows 7 and 8 no longer have the issues you list. . . nor need to de-frag, etc. But a lot of ex-Windows people are still holding those OLD memes. . . and they think they have to run utilities to do it. It is these people who keep the Mac Anti-virus industry solvent.
Those who still own Windows boxes buy such utilities and use them even on modern Windows platforms. You see such utilities being advertised on TV to them. . . even one that crows about it being named the BEST Windows utility by PC Magazine and PC World (in 2005! LOL! I saw that ad just tonight. "But wait, call now and we'll send you two more for the price of one, just pay extra shipping and handling!") This is a sad fact but true.
Apple Macs clean up those temporary files.. . and clean up cache files. Apple Macs optimize the drive with every software install and if you leave your Apple on all the time, it does a lot of housekeeping when it's idle. . . and modern Windows are getting there on that. too.
But a lot of new Mac users came out of older Windows and remember doing defrags and getting faster responses from their computers. Many of them think that's what MacKeeper will do on a Mac. . . because running utilities like it on a Windows machine would speed up the Windows machine. "Defrag" was the term the non-techs remember. I STILL regularly get calls from people who want to know when they should "defrag" or "optimize" their drives on Windows 7, 8 or 8.1. Seriously. No one told them it was no longer necessary. It was to THEM I was addressing my comments.
So, Rarestia, you need to consider the people to whom MacKeeper is targeting and the people toward whom I was addressing my comments. . . to inform them in terms THEY would understand and relate to. NOT in terms of modern computers they don't believe DON'T need those things anymore. Think in terms of what they learned years ago. . . not what they should have learned as things improved.
Just last week i got a question from a new Mac user about how they could clean their Registry (!) on their Mac. See what i mean? My point on this thread was not to knock Windows, but to save people from thinking they need MacKeeper. They do not.
I'll admit when I first started using Linux, I asked how to defrag the hard drive. This was years ago on a 5400RPM laptop HDD, so it was slow anyway. That was when I started to understand how bad some things are in Windows.
I appreciate the civil discussion, sword. I have nothing against Apple. I find many of their acolytes to be incredibly combative, but you're pretty level-headed all told.
I fit that category. I had a 486 machine back in the day, and I got sick of worrying about viruses. What really got me was when someone who was emailing stuff I was interested in and trusted sent me a phishing attack. And I fell for it, because it came from a trusted source. I fell for it, because it preyed on my fear of viruses. You will understand, the phishing attack hit my trusted source first, and fooled him first - so if I fell for it, I have no justification for being angry at him for falling for it first.Enter OS X. I understood that it was based in Unix, and I understood that, being designed from the ground up as a multiuser, multitasking OS, Unix was inherently more robust than DOS, and that Windows sat on top of DOS. So I bought an iMac, back in G4 days. And I have stayed with OS X ever since, now on my third Mac, a 5K with fusion drive. But as you say, old WindowsThink (I suppose in light of developments in Win7 and subsequent I should call it OldWindowsThink) dies hard.
It doesn’t hurt my feelings to be reassured that OldWindowsThink is really out of date; Free at Last, as the song goes. And I learned from you that I should - and how I should - transition from operating in an Admin account to operating in a vanilla user account. So I hope that Rarestia will cut you some slack and appreciate that some of us actually need and significantly benefit from your OS X and iOS evangelism. Without it I very well might fall for something as ridiculous as MacKeeper.
I made the mistake of getting MacKeeper a while back and I am still trying to get rid of it totally on one machine. I did the search for everything containing Zeobit and/or MacKeeper and nuked everything I could find but I think something is still hanging out in that computer because it slows to a crawl for no reason and has to be restarted everyday and sometimes more often than that.
These were the same problems I had before I nuked everything. Could there be remnants of the MacKeeper program lurking under different names?
At this point, I am ready to nuke the computer and get a new one. Not really cost effective but neither is the insanity incurred while using it.
Thanks for any help you can suggest.
Sea