Earlier this month, following Ben Myers’ article in the Newsletter, I installed Microsoft PC Manager, and used it a couple times to do computer cleanup. A couple days after I started using the program, an alert popped up from my computer security systems saying that it had blocked a requested connection to a website in China. That same alert started popping up every few days. During this same time period, a few of my applications started misbehaving. Steam, for example, took an abnormally long time to load, and games that had always run fine on Steam began to crash.
I did some research and discovered that the request to connect to a website in China was indeed coming from Microsoft PC Manager. What I read was that PC Manager is actually distributed by Microsoft China. I may be a little overly concerned, but when I read this, I immediately did a full uninstall of PC Manager. Lo and behold, all my applications started running normally again, and the China connection alert has ceased.
I obviously have no way of knowing if the problems with the applications on my computer were related at all to anything about PC Manager. It may just be coincidence, but it does seem a little suspect that they happened while PC Manager was installed. In any case, an unsolicited connection to a China website would always raise a red flag for me.
Is anyone else having similar issues? Am I being too paranoid? I would be interested in anyone’s thoughts about this. Thanks.
