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Is MacBooster safe

My MacBook is painfully slow to boot up, and often beachballs in safari.

Any tips for a not very tech-savvy user?

Cheers

MacBook (13-inch Late 2008), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Nov 1, 2013 8:46 AM

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60 replies

Jul 31, 2017 6:36 PM in response to dmche

MacBooster's a scam - and, worse, it's a scam made by a company that runs a tech support scam "service." If you call them for service, they will ask for remote access to your Mac, then tell you all about all the "malware" on it. (I've got a recorded call in which they did that to me, on a perfectly clean Mac system that wasn't more than an hour or so old.)


If you installed MacBooster, now you need to get rid of it too.


I hate self-promotion, but I do know that Malwarebytes will get rid of both Advanced Mac Cleaner and MacBooster. There's no need to purchase to clean that stuff up, you can do that for free.

Sep 4, 2017 12:07 PM in response to timfromwinchester

Hi Tim from Winchester.


MacBooster is as safe as any other app you use on your mac. The question is, what are you expecting out of it. MacBooster has some pretty neat maintenance options that match the same maintenance tools that your MacOS provides too. So, it's not really true when people say that tools like these are utterly useless. But they aren't magic bullets either.

For your problem, you can check your Safari extensions and turn them off to see if it resolves the problem. If it does, try turning them back on one by one and see what was causing Safari to behave this way. You can also consider the application reset option on MacBooster, but remember, you will lose all your browsing history and cookies. So, you might have to login to all your previously logged-in websites once again.


Coming to MacBooster, it comes with a startup optimizer, disk cleaner, duplicate photo finder, and other useful features that you might find useful too (application reset feature is already what you are probably looking for). These are no outlandish promises. In fact, these are probably things you would sit down to do manually anyway once you start feeling your mac is slowing down.


We took some time to use MacBooster, and came up with a review after a week of usage. The application seems pretty stable to us. Give our MacBooster 5 review a read and then decide if you need it still.


[Disclosure: We take part in affiliate marketing, but we do not sell our souls. So, that review is as genuine as it can get.]


Cheers.

Sep 5, 2017 1:35 AM in response to lostmonk

MacBooster is about as safe as MacKeeper, from which it is obviously derived.


Last time I checked the uninstaller didn't uninstall all the executables installed by the MacBooster installer, and also was misnamed as com.apple.UninstallerAD, which is incompetent at best and deceitful at worst.


I'll leave others to decide where on the spectrum they want to put that, but neither end is reassuring.

Sep 5, 2017 1:31 PM in response to lostmonk

lostmonk wrote:


MacBooster is as safe as any other app you use on your mac.


MacBooster is made by a tech support scam company. I called their tech support number, and their representative asked for remote access to my Mac. I gave them access to a clean Mac system with a few decoy documents on it, and nothing more, and this representative tried to convince me it was infected with malware using classic scammer techniques (pointing at perfectly normal log file entries in the Console and telling me they were signs of infection).


The folks behind MacBooster deserve to get shut down. I have no idea why they haven't been yet.


[Disclosure: We take part in affiliate marketing, but we do not sell our souls. So, that review is as genuine as it can get.]


So, in other words, you're getting paid by a tech support scam company to post reviews of their product.

Sep 6, 2017 12:31 AM in response to thomas_r.

Hi Thomas.


If what you are saying is true, we will probably need to downgrade our rating. Can you share the recording of what you experienced, and we will try to reach IOBit for an explanation.


I contacted the author. The way she sees it, MacBooster has tools for things you would want to do normally (MacBooster or not); things like removing startup items, removing duplicate files, scanning for malware, removing unwanted cookies, uninstalling application junk which typical uninstallers do not remove.


That made it look like a safe application to her.

Sep 6, 2017 6:31 AM in response to lostmonk

lostmonk wrote:


If what you are saying is true, we will probably need to downgrade our rating. Can you share the recording of what you experienced, and we will try to reach IOBit for an explanation.


I have a recording, including audio of the conversation as well as what was happening on the screen, but I'm not able to release it publicly at this time for legal reasons. I'll check in with my company's legal department and see if anything has changed.


I personally would like nothing more than to post the video on YouTube.

Nov 26, 2013 6:59 PM in response to timfromwinchester

Any software that purports to make the Mac faster is selling snake oil.

System cache cleaning, which is one of many of these vendors hallmark, actually slows it down!

The problem is that cache file cleaning of the system can actually lead to cache corruption.


Suffice it to say, the only regular maintenance a Mac needs is backing up.


When it comes to slowdown, once your system is backed, you should make sure the hard drive isn't over 85% full.

Anti-virus, Mackeeper, firewall software are the worst, and really are not necessary unless you engage in risky behavior such as peer2peer software, and torrent reading.


Stick to known software sites such as Apple's Mac App Store and software vendors themselves.


Do not download updates because Adobe says there is an update available, go directly to Adobe's website to get the update.


Repairing permissions through Disk Utility can help.


If you are backed up at least twice, we can suggest other things like repairing the directory, and checking the hardware test for errors.


Removing bad software gets trickier, and it is best left to your consulting the vendors in question, other than Mackeeper, which I've linked above to how to remove.

Nov 27, 2013 3:18 AM in response to timfromwinchester

My MacBook is painfully slow to boot up, and often beachballs in safari.

Any tips for a not very tech-savvy user?


I see that I'm almost a month late here, but will respond on the off-chance that you're still listening. I would agree with the others that software like MacBooster is completely unnecessary and will not solve your problems. Never download anything claiming to be able to speed up or clean your Mac! They're all basically just scams.


As for solving the performance issues, try the suggestions in my Mac Performance Guide.

Is MacBooster safe

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