Wednesday, June 06, 2007

The Great Defrag Shootout XIV: Abexo Defragmenter Pro Plus

Scam Alert! Abexo Defragmenter Pro Plus 5.0 costs $34.95, and its lesser cousin Abexo Defragmenter Lite 5.0 costs $19.95. It offers a hard disk cleanup facility, as well as defragmentation, but uses the built-in WDD for this purpose.
You start off selecting a set of options and which drive letters to process. When done, the program will reboot the PC and perform the tasks required, and then on completion reboot the PC to give you control back. So it's quite disruptive.
Unfortunately a lot of these options are ill-advised: deleting all the prefetch files doesn't speed up anything, and can actually make matters worse. Rather use the free CCleaner product which has better options and doesn't damage your system.
The next list of options again offers some weird options, and doesn't explain what these do. Documentation is actually quite weak for a $35 product. The "defragment" option uses the built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter, similar to the free SpeeDefrag product. And ScanDisk is also built in to Windows. The only "added value" is the ability to select all these actions in one place.
When I saw this screen I thought that some of these ideas were remarkably similar to those offered by the free JkDefrag program.
I was shocked to see that the "defrag" option uses the Windows defrag.exe, and even more shocked when the final "Optimise" screen (see top graphic) appeared, because it is obviously using the GPL-licensed JkDefrag libraries without even acknowledging the author or conforming to the license agreement. The screens refer to the "top" of the drive, but show the "top" of the drive at the bottom of the screen, the way JkDefrag does. A lot of the other aspects are also unique to JkDefrag. Why, then, should you pay $34.95 for this package? I cannot think of a single reason other than because ripped off, or you're willing to pay a lot of money for a cute logo.
In an email to me they deny using the JkDefrag code, even though they got some "ideas" from the product. They say the screen display is a "quick and dirty" [sic] method, to be refined later. I guess I won't be paying $35 for a quick and dirty product.
I could find no information on their web site for the location of their offices or any other contact details. I eventually traced their domain name details to: 179 Osborn Avenue, Brantford, ONTARIO N3T 6S7 Phone +1-519-774-0498. Don't bother to even download this product, let alone buy it. It offers nothing you can't already do for free. If you already paid for a copy, demand a refund, on the basis of copyright violation and fraud.
Another program that does this (although it is free) is SpeedItUp FREE 4.0, published by MicroSmarts LLC, 700 Commerce Dr, Suite 500, Oak Brook, IL 60523. Phone +1-708-748-7558. Both of these programs are in violation of the LGPL and GPL licenses. I guess "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".

The Great Defrag Shootout: Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV | XVI | XVII | XVIII | XIX | XX | XXI | XXII | XXIII | XXIV | XXV | XXVI | XXVII | XXVIII | XXIX| winner | all | why

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is disgusting! Have these people no shame?

Anonymous said...

Indeed pretty stupid to steal the source code from the great project 'JkDefrag'.

Anonymous said...

I've been using their lite version for five years, I think whomever wrote this review wishes they could thought of it 1st

Donn Edwards said...

I wrote the review and I'm sickened that someone could shamelessly repackage GPL software as their own work and sell it. You were ripped off!