These cost $50 for anyone uninformed enough to purchase one. Most people ask for them as part of an ongoing subscription. Which makes it slightly less ridiculous because the per-tuneup price can drop to $10 or so.
However:
A "tune-up" explicitly does not include any troubleshooting.
And... there are only three possible reasons your computer might need tuning up in the first place:
- Your computer has too many crappy programs installed and they're all running at once and starting up with Windows (and/or you have third-party toolbars stacked up in your web browsers). If they're legitimate programs, you can and should uninstall them on your own. It's easy to do.
- Your computer has spyware/adware/malware/viruses. You're in trouble.
- You've somehow tinkered with your Windows settings and screwed them up. You're in trouble.
Of these, a tuneup can really only help with #1. We cannot do anything about 2 or 3 without upselling the customer to a much, much more expensive package.
In other words, people are just getting help removing software they could remove themselves.
Today I had a caller ask me for two tuneups, one on each of her two computers. Both were new computers, with all settings at default Windows configurations, and both had the usual amount of junkware for that situation: nothing too bad. The customer didn't, however, want me to remove any programs.
Which means that the tune-ups didn't actually do anything at all.
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