I’ve been at this IT consulting business full time since 2018. I’ve tried a lot of products during that time. Some products come with a great reputation. Some products, you’ve never heard of. The only way to really find out who the winners and losers are is to get your hands dirty and to give them a try yourself.
Having done that, I have discovered one product which does the job of three. The product is called PCmatic. (https://www.pcmatic.com) PCmatic on the surface appears to be an antivirus, anti-malware program. And it is. It does that very well. The way PCmatic works is an executable file has to be in their database of safe applications before it will allow it to run. You might think that’s a pretty unusual way to do an anti-malware scenario. But the fact is, it’s pretty brilliant.
If PCmatic will stop any application that it’s not familiar with, that means you don’t have to worry about ransomware. Ransomware is the biggest nightmare out there. Ransomware has caused corporations to shut down for a week or more while they rebuild. Ransomware can certainly destroy everything that a homeowner has. By blocking unknown applications, PCmatic makes ransomware impossible to run.
Now, you will get a lot of false alarms right after you install it. That is, applications which you’re used to have running, which will no longer run. In my case, this includes batch files. And I use batch files to do my local backups for my commercial clients. I have to whitelist the batch file before it will run, because batch files simply aren’t practical to have in a database. However, once I do that, the batch file runs fine.
You log into a website and you allow the application there with the version of PCmatic I’m using, which is for consultants with a lot of customers. The second thing PCMagic does is clean up old garbage files. There’s a lot of old stuff that builds up on a system over time. One of the biggest offenders is Windows Update files, which are no longer needed after they run and update your system. Internet caches can get gigantic and harbor a lot of bad behaviors. PCmatic takes care of all this. It also will scan through your registry and clean up garbage there. And it identifies bad startups and kills them all. It does very well at that.
The third thing that PCmatic does is provide you with a remote control client. It uses VNC. To allow you to go to a customer’s desktop. And it works really well. Prior to this, I was using Remote PC for my remote control stuff. And while a good product, it did some things that annoyed me. For example, it would always pop up on a user’s machine repeatedly saying that I had remote control power. There’s no reason to have that continually pop up and annoy the user. The only way I can turn it off is to upgrade to a more expensive version.
So, lately I’ve been using PCmatic to do all of my remote control work. Occasionally, it will fail to start. And when that happens, I ask the customer to do a reboot, and I can get in after that. But most of the time, if I click on the remote control icon, I get right in.
What does that mean for the business user? It means one reasonably priced product can replace three products that are probably more expensive. In my case, I was paying around $3,000 a year for my antivirus, my system cleanup, and my remote control software. With PCmatic… That price was cut by about 75%. That means my profit margin is up 75%.
It also keeps things simpler. I don’t have to prepare for a large, very reasonable amount they’re charging me. And the return is very important. When I have an issue and email them about it, I generally have a response within 30 minutes. And they take care of business. In one case, I had an application that PCmatic had labeled as a bad behaver, and it would not allow me to whitelist it. When I explained this to tech support, they had me whitelisted and running within a half an hour. That was pretty impressive.
I’m using PCMatic on about 110 computers. you. It’s been hassle-free, reliable, and customer-friendly. I stay logged in to the web interface and I look for blocked applications. If I see one, I will quickly whitelist it if it’s obvious, or I’ll make a phone call to a customer and whitelist it after talking to them, confirming that it is a legitimate application. And from my end, a customer calls me up with an issue of a blocked application. I log in to the back end, spot it, whitelist it, and we’re done. In the course of two minutes, their application and everybody’s happy.
All in all, I find PCmatic to be a very impressive program. A lot of bang for the buck. You also appreciate what you’re getting for what you’re paying.