FinallyFast.Com (Finally Fast Dot Com): Scam or Legit?

Being unable to sleep has some disadvantages, not the least of which is staring at the television while late night infomercial drone on about the benefits of their product, program or service. Everything from kitchen products to make gourmet meals from leftovers to exercise equipment stored under the bed, guaranteed to make anyone look like a supermodel in less than 30 second per day use.

I have digital cable, with over 300 stations, and Chuck Norris was on about 119 of them last night. While flipping through the late-night offerings, I was oh-so-lucky as to stumble upon a commercial for FinallyFast.com, expounding on the benefits of their 'FREE' computer check. As with any thought that comes this side of 6am, I had the crazy idea it would be a good idea to look this website up on the internet and see what they were all about.

Does FinallyFast.com really work? Can FinallyFast.com really speed up my internet? Can FinallyFast.com really speed up my computer? Does FinallyFast.com really do all of this for free?

FinallyFast.com, The Commercial

"My computer used to be fast. Really fast. Now it's only kind of fast." This is the lead-in line of the really bad acting for the main character in the FinallyFast.com commercial. Then, we see several people using their computers, all of which appear to be Apple brand computers, who are having trouble getting web pages to load, can't check their email, IM windows are shutting down, error window messages are popping up, and one even gets the 'blue screen of death'. The insinuation: our product fixes all of these issues.

At the end of the commercial, the same lead character is sitting at his computer talking to himself, tapping on his keyboard, excited his computer is fast, finally. Ding-ding! It dawns on him what the program name means, and he perks up like he discovered gravity and says, "FinallyFast.com!"

Whoohoo!

After I took an Alka-seltzer to get rid of the heartburn (disclaimer: I'm not necessarily saying FinallyFast.com causes heartburn), I noted the small print that said FinallyFast.com's software was only useable on PCs. If that's the case, why were most all the computers in the commercial Apple brand computers and the one keyboard shot is clearly the white Apple tray keyboard?

FinallyFast.com, The Company

The commercial says FinallyFast.com is owned by Ascentive, which was featured in a bunch of very prominent magazines, including Business Week and Forbes. This claim is true. Ascentive was featured in these magazines, but not for FinallyFast.com or the software on the FinallyFast.com site. Ascentive was featured for a program for employers called BeAware, which allows employers to 'snoop' on their employee's computer usage. You'll note in the commercial it never said FinallyFast.com was featured; only that the parent company, Ascentive, was featured. A tad misleading, no?

FinallyFast.com, The Website and Software

When you go to FinallyFast.com's website, you will get a free performance check. Yes, the performance check IS free. Of course, the check will always find something wrong with your computer. Always.

How do I know? Well, because my daughter works as a manager for an office supply store, and we took a brand new laptop at the store and ran FinallyFast.com's free performance check on it, and it found all sorts of problems! On a new, out-of-the-box computer that had never even been on the internet before!

While the performance check is free, the only way to fix the discovered problems is to purchase the two programs they offer. Though they will tell you that it's okay to buy just one or the other of them, they have them packaged to purchase for about $60 bucks for both. You can download them, or you can call and give them your credit card number and they'll send you a CD-rom.

You Mean, FinallyFast.com Isn't Free?

Nope, it's not. Though they say it is free to check, it is not free to fix what it finds (even though we believe the findings are bogus). You have to buy the software to do that. But the money doesn't end there. You see, in order to keep the software up to date, you have to pay for a subscription service, and purchasing the CD-rom automatically enrolls you in the subscription service. Some users on the internet have reported unauthorized charges to their credit/debit cards, and have reported difficulty unsubscribing.

Okay, It Costs, But Does FinallyFast.com Really Work?

Well, that's a tough one to answer without getting myself into a libel situation, so I will be honest. Yes, it works. FinallyFast.com CAN speed up both your internet and your computer speed.

How?

By doing things you yourself can do, such as removing spyware, adware and temporary internet files, clearing your cache and removing other temporary files. It also walks you through doing normal system maintenance that everyone should be doing on their computer semi-regularly anyway. Everything FinallyFast.com does do to increase a computer's speed, you can do yourself for absolutely free, and super easy too.

I highly recommend downloading Spybot Search & Destroy, a free program, to locate spyware and Lavasoft's Adaware, also a free program, to catch whatever might be missed by Spybot. That, along with a good antivirus program (AVG has a free one that's great!), will keep your computer fast and clean.

By the way, pick up the phone and call FinallyFast.com and ask them what they think about Spybot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's Adaware, and they will insinuate that when something is free, it has viruses and bugs that are not good. They sure did their best to convince me that these programs, both of which are well-known on the internet and used by even the hard-core geeks, were bad.

But FinallyFast.com Says it Can Speed Up My Internet?

FinallyFast.com claims it can increase your internet speed by up to 375%. This is misleading. Your internet speed itself is limited to you connection speed from your internet service provider. The only real way to speed up your internet is to purchase a faster internet service. Therefore, the claims that they can increase your internet connection speed are absolutely, completely bogus, as are the claims that they can speed up your download times.

That said, computers can be 'tricked' to appear to load faster in your web browser. Some dialup ISPs have offered this feature as an 'accelerator' or 'speed booster' for years. What they do, in lay terms, is reduce the quality of the images shown to you on your browser while you surf. This makes images (and a web page is made of a bunch of images) appear less sharp, less bright, less colorful, and sometimes, hard to see detail.

While this will speed up your surfing on a dialup connection, doing this really doesn't help your broadband connections and it reduces your entire experience on the web.

So What's The Final Verdict for FinallyFast.com?

I won't go so far as to say FinallyFast.com is a scam. I will, however, say that it's advertisement on television is completely misleading, and perhaps could even be considered fraudulent by some (by 'some', I mean, well, me and any sane human being who knows anything about computers, at all, even a little bit).

The final verdict for FinallyFast.com is that it does absolutely nothing to help your computer that you could not do yourself absolutely free. In fact, not only does FinallyFast.com not do anything to benefit your computer, but it can actually cause programs to work slower and can install what AVG decided was a TrojanHorse5.hpt on a brand new computer, right out of the box.

Misleading advertising, false claims, erroneous claims against free 'competitors', hard-core sales pushes when you call, software that lies about what it finds on the computer, and TrojanHorse type activity that actually slows down your computer and not speed it up... I think it's safe to say FinallyFast.com is not a good choice for your computer. That is, if you need to use your computer and internet.

If, however, you would like a monitor bookend, an odd computer-shaped brick, or something to use as a coaster, that you pay for with your credit card every month, go ahead and purchase FinallyFast.com. Just don't come back here and complain to me when you do. If you have purchased this service and software, I'd recommend uninstalling it immediately, or take your computer to an authorized service agent you can trust and have them clean it up for you.