PC Tools (founded in 2003), formerly known as WinGuides.com, was a software company acquired by Symantec in 2008; the new owner eventually discontinued the PC Tools name. Company headquarters were in Australia, with offices in Luxembourg, the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Ukraine. The company had previously developed and distributed security and optimization software for the

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

and Microsoft Windows platforms.

Products

By 29 November 2006 software owned by PC Tools had been downloaded over 125 million times.

PC Tools Browser Defender

PC Tools Browser Defender, also called Browser Defender for short, is a browser toolbar for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...

and Mozilla Firefox browsers on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

based computers. Browser Defender allows for safe web surfing.

PC Tools iAntiVirus

iAntivirus was updated in 2012 and rebranded under Symantec's Norton brand. PC Tools iAntiVirus is free

antivirus software Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name. ...

for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

based

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

computers running

Mac OS 10.5 Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X Tig ...

(Leopard) and Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) initially released in June 2008, used to detect and remove malware,

spyware Spyware (a portmanteau for spying software) is software with malicious behaviour that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send it to another entity in a way that harms the user—for example, by violating their priva ...

and malicious exploits, using both signature-based and heuristic detection. AntiVirus was criticized because it only scans for Macintosh viruses, ignoring

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

viruses. It was praised for its speed and low usage of system resources.

PC Tools Internet Security

PC Tools Internet Security, was the combination of the Spyware Doctor product the Firewall product and the Anti Spam product. It provided the functionality of all three stand alone products into a single seamless product. Symantec is no longer offering this product as of 18 May 2013. It was payware designed for

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

(32-/64-bit),

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

(32-/64-bit),

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

(32-/64-bit) and

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

(32-bit).

PC Tools Registry Mechanic

PC Tools Registry Mechanic, the first software PC Tools released, scanned the Windows registry to find errors. Version 11, released on 31 October 2011, is the last one.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor

PC Tools Spyware Doctor, is anti-malware software. Spyware Doctor detects malware based on indicators of compromise using its spider technology. The most recent version of Spyware Doctor is 9, which was released on 31 October 2011. Symantec is no longer offering this product as of 18 May 2013.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus

PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus has the same features as Spyware Doctor, with added anti-virus capabilities. Symantec has not sold this since 2013; v9 is the last one available.

ThreatExpert

The ThreatExpert Web site says that it is an advanced automated threat analysis system (initialized ''ATAS'') built to analyze and report the actions of malware in a fully automated mode. the latest version was beta version 1.0.1.0 of 1 March 2008. There have been no updates since March 2008, and the Web site seems inactive.

Acquisition by Symantec

On 18 August 2008, Symantec announced the signing of an agreement to acquire PC Tools such that PC Tools would maintain separate operations. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Symantec acquired PC Tools for

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

262,000,000 on 6 October 2008. Symantec withdrew the entire PC Tools security portfolio, comprising PC Tools Internet Security, Spyware Doctor and Spyware Doctor with Antivirus, on 18 May 2013; PC Tools was not sold and could not be renewed from 4 December 2013. Symantec said that this would not affect PC Tools Utilities products.

Reception

Spyware Doctor received the

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tech ...

''Best Buy'' award in the October 2007 issue of the magazine saying "PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0 was the winner, outperforming the competition at detecting and removing our test set of adware and spyware samples." Spyware Doctor has received several Editors' Choice awards from PC Magazine, including one for Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 5.5 in 2008. The product has also received numerous other awards from around the globe. Not all reviews have been positive and early versions of Spyware Doctor 5.0, which the company rewrote from scratch, received some negative commentary. CNET's Download.com
reviews
justifies the 3-star rating by saying, "in our trial scans, Spyware Doctor repeatedly flagged several dozen harmless cookies as potential threats, more than any other antispyware product we tested. We were also unable to learn more about each threat or why Spyware Doctor flagged each."

Criticism

Symantec was unsuccessfully sued by a Washington resident for running fake scans to get people to pay for subscriptions to PC Tools's Registry Mechanic, Performance Toolkit, and

Norton Utilities Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 was released 26 Oc ...

The lawsuit claims the company intentionally ran the fake scans and the results were not real.

References

External links

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ThreatExpertiAntiVirusBrowser Defender
{{DEFAULTSORT:PC Tools (Company) Antivirus software Firewall software Gen Digital acquisitions