Named & Shamed
Junk Offender: Winzip Driver Updater
Junk offender: Winzip Driver Updater
I’ve been known to call out dodgy driver updaters in the past (and, yes, I’m looking at you, iobit Driver Booster). But when the program in question bears the respected Winzip name, you’d probably assume that it’s a more trustworthy prospect. Don’t you believe it.
Winzip has been around for more than 30 years and these days is owned by the equally renowned Corel Corporation. It’s still best known for zipping and unzipping files, but has branched into other areas in recent years via a series of “powerful, one-click solutions to take care of your daily PC needs” (according to www.winzipsystemtools.com anyway), including Driver Updater.
Driver Updater is supposed to maximise your PC’S performance. In practice it can actually have the opposite effect, largely as a result of it setting itself to launch automatically whenever you boot your PC, slowing down startup and draining resources needlessly in the background. And it does this without asking your permission – you need to click Options and untick ‘Run on Startup’ and ‘Minimize to Tray’ boxes if you want to put a stop to this.
Further annoyances include being constantly spammed with adverts for other Winzip products – some of these entirely obscure the program window itself. And the final kick in the teeth is the way it continually attempts to trick you into upgrading to the premium version (for £32 per year) whenever you attempt to update a driver that’s been flagged as out of date. Sneakily, it tries to trick you into thinking you have to click ‘Register now’ to continue (see screenshot) – but you don’t. Just ignore it and leave this tool well alone.