"Large" Suite Does the Job

Not all of us enjoy messing around with technology; backing up files, restoring software, tweaking application settings, defragmenting our hard drives and so forth. In that regard, I ran a scan using Large Software's "PC Tune-Up" suite on my XP machine.

The Suite quickly found about 504 problems, most of them said to be "serious" or "moderately serious." The dashboard information was clear, intuitive and the scan seemed to run faster than I recall other similar suites operating. Again, this was not a controlled test, so I can't speak to how other programs might have performed.

I will say the application executed much faster than I was expecting, especially in the defragmentation phase of the tune-up.

As service providers look to avoid "dumb pipe" status, supplying enterprise, peformance optimization would seem a logical place to extend the range of services such as anti-virus, firewall and anti-spam functions many Internet service providers now supply as an integral part of the access service.

The other thing is that some services are more "logical" parts of service bundles. An enriched software experience that improves Web and Internet performance probably will be seen by users as a logical extension of basic access.

Also, as the actual user experience migrates beyond a service provider network interface (a router in a small business setting, IP phones in an enterprise or mid-sized business setting or the PC in a consumer application, service providers of necessity will be seen as the "entity to call" when something isn't functioning properly.

If you can't avoid the calls to your customer service center, you might as well extend service and support to the actual end user device. Most of us by now have discovered the "dueling applications" problem when loading any new software. A hosted approach should eliminate that problem.

That's not to say I experienced a single issue using the downloaded version of the software. Set-up was completely uneventful and the application executed better than I expected. The observation is simply that distribution as part of a bundled "access" service would make sense.

Lots of us just want to do things. We don't want to be system administrators. This should help.