Find out how you can avoid the MacKeeper Virus on your laptop.
Image source: mac-reviews.net
If your Mac is acting slowly and crashes all the time, chances are that you have installed an app called MacKeeper. So, what is MacKeeper and what does the software actually do?
Zeobit originally developed MacKeeper some years ago and sold it to another company called Kromtech. The software claimed it contained several other utilities that were supposed to improve the performance of your Macintosh. Those utilities were optimization software, an antivirus, tools for removing junk files and many more.
MacKeeper uses ads that appear on web-sites and tells users that their Mac is infected. These kinds of scare-ads are a very low business technique and the developers of the software have been criticized for hosting web sites that are filled with fake reviews intended to promote the malware. When the developers were confronted about this matter, they blamed the aggressive marketing technique on someone else, saying that they had absolutely nothing to do with it. However, if your partners in charge with the marketing of your software do such shady things in order of getting the attention of consumers, it’s safe to say that you, as a developer, are as much part of the problem as your partners are.
But the biggest problem with the software is that it is able of making an otherwise balanced and reliable computer into something that is barely usable. The software is even capable of embedding itself so deep into the operating system that uninstalling it takes a lot of time and is a very weird and uncomfortable process. Uninstalling an app from a Mac should never be more complicated than simply dragging it into Trash and then emptying the Trash folder and maybe be asked to enter the administrative password of your computer. However, MacKeeper makes all this very difficult by asking you to explain why you want the software removed and even forces you to verify that you actually want the software gone.
But even after you “uninstall” the software, it doesn’t disappear from your system completely. You will be left with traces of the malware in the system library folder and removing all of them is a very tedious and painful task.
Image source: nettoyerpc.fr
Various forums and comments on web sites regard this program as a MacKeeper virus, and some of these sites (important ones such as MacWorld and CNET) even have step by step guides on how to uninstall it. The fact is that the software isn’t a virus per se, to be completely honest. It’s just a very annoying and poorly built software who tries to force itself on the users. We don’t know exactly how and why the program destabilizes the operating system in such a way but we can tell you that after the software is removed from the Mac the problems simply go away.
The developers of the software aren’t exactly thieves and some people who have paid for it and installed it on their Macs (only to immediately regret that they did such a thing) eventually got a refund after they requested one from the company. This means that you will indeed receive a refund if you feel like you’ve been ripped off (and you will, if you are one of the unfortunate ones that actually installed the software on their Macs).
The best thing to do is simply avoid installing the software on your computer in the first place.
We’ve installed MacKeeper on a computer to see what the big deal is and we can honestly say that you should stay away from it. It’s definitely not an app that respects the guidelines for developers required by Apple and should be avoided even though you’ve probably seen a review or two about it on the Internet.