[genewitch]

I worked at a now-defunct electronics store (not fry's in this instance) in the early 2000s that offered this "tune-up" - it was to remove the stuff that HP and Dell got paid to pre-install, and to fully update windows and whatever else.

Remove the mcafee nuisance popups and any browser "addons" that were badged/branded. and IIRC we charged more than $50 for that service back then.

[fbdab103]

For the performance boost it could offer the unsavy user stuck on a HDD, it was probably worth it to many. Gross to be the middleman, but it is what it is.

[genewitch]

Another computer shop i worked in charged $90 for virus removal, but we also eventually made it policy to just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap and fully update the OS. Prior to that the policy was "remove viruses, remove crapware, update OS", but we had a few customers that had machines with 30,000 viruses. I forget what the record was, but it was way up there in count. Trying to clean those machines had a marginal failure rate, enough that it was costing the owner money to have us repeatedly clean them without payment.

No one wants to tell a customer that they need to find better adult content sites, and that we won't be cleaning their machines without payment anymore!

[lukan]

"just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap"

And that is not more work?

It was usually the way I did it, too. But this requires checking with the owner what apps are important, saved preferences, where are the important files stored (they never know) etc.