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The software itself, is very effective, providing an average speed-up of around 75%, without requiring user intervention. The software works with any standard dial-up connection and is entirely free to use. However, some people have reported that there is no noticeable speed-up in access, we did notice a perceived difference with the more popular sites, although nowhere near as much of a speedup as with the Propel commercial internet accelerator or the OnSpeed internet accelerator. The main reason for the difference in speed-up is that marketscore merely divert your internet access via their fast network servers, whereas Propel (whilst doing the same thing) also compress various elements off each page before transmission from their servers to your computer, as well as storing them compressed on your hard-drive, so that they can be quickly loaded in at a later date. The Marketscore program also allows you to enable scanning of your incoming emails using software by Symantec (who produce the market leading Norton Antivirus software). This is a free service and certainly worth while using although it will only work with POP3 enabled email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger and Eudora. This does unfortunately mean that it will not work with some of the more popular email software, such as AOL, AT&T, Lotus Notes and Exchange mail. Marketscore Marketscore has now also formed a new on-line survey site, OpinionSquare. Not only does this offer competitions for those who enter surveys, but also offers points for answering surveys - these points can then be spent with various trading partners. As with all of these survey sites, the type of survey tends to be varied and generally ask you to complete a short survey in order to identify whether you belong to the target group required. Surveys are generally used by product manufacturers to judge how a new advertising scheme should be run, or can even be used to influence the development of new products. This service also dictates that you join the Marketscore program, which in turn installs the free internet accelerator. There is, however, a problem in that Marketscore state that they do not support all internet browsers, including some of the most popular non-Microsoft products (Netscape 6.0 and OPERA 5). At the time of writing, they do not have a timetable for implementing support for these browsers. Support for Internet Explorer v6.0 has recently been added and it is therefore hoped that with a little persuasion from users, support for these other browsers will also be implemented. Presumably their software notices that this version is unsupported and if necessary, by-passes their proxy server. Problems with AOL Browser?? However, we have found that when doing more unconventional surfing, there could be problems, in that not all web-sites support proxy connections and under heavy usage, some slow sites cause a page to timeout before loading. Marketscore also fails to complete to some floating network connections such as ICQ Web Version. Luckily, this is unlikely to affect the average internet user, although we have found some problems where more than one browser has been open (such as AOL and Internet Explorer) when the Marketscore software is installed. There are apparently also some known problems with accessing certain sites under the AOL browser, although we are informed that Marketscore do work closely with AOL to ensure any compatibility issues are resolved. Certainly, some users have noticed that they sometimes get a Microsoft exception warning that Internet Explorer or WAOL has caused an error in the CLSOA.DLL file (which causes problems with shutting down the system afterwards). It is unknown whether this is due to the Marketscore software or AOL itself. However, this can generally be rectified by using the Repair Internet Explorer option in the Add/Remove programs option in Windows Control Panel. AOL users will notice one big problem with Marketscore's Internet Accelerator - if you are using AOL v7 on Windows 98, you cannot access any secure websites from within the AOL browser, although this does work under AOL v8 and v9. The situation is made worse under Windows XP, where, although you can happily access secure sites, you cannot access standard HTTP sites either from within the AOL browser (v7 and v8 included) or Internet Explorer v6. The program installed on your computer is automatically updated to the latest version and you will therefore benefit automatically whenever Marketscore do manage to resolve any compatibility issues. We did however find that under Windows XP, we needed to disable Norton Internet Security in order to install the program initially (this was not necessary under Windows 98). So, what are the pitfalls?? Do not worry that you will be inundated with more junk emails and surveys, all of your details are stored securely by Marketscore and not passed onto any other companies, although they do share personally identifiable details with the companies which subscribe to their service to find out browsing trends. However, Marketscore do monitor your use of the internet and maintain a database of which web-sites are visited most frequently and the types of transactions you carry out (such as purchases or registrations). Although they are able to monitor transactions on secure sites, they maintain the security of the link - any personal information which is entered (such as credit card details) is encrypted on their servers to ensure that no-one else can access the information. As such for anyone who uses the internet to transmit sensitive data, such as commercial deals, they may wish to avoid using this service unless they use their own form of encryption on the data itself.
Having spoken to several users who have tried the Marketscore program How to remove or disable the Marketscore Accelerator. Quite a few people seem to have problems removing this from their system once installed. You can generally do so by logging onto the secure part of marketscore.com website (member services) and selecting remove services. Although this would seem to be a problem for AOL users, they can of course start up another browser, such as Internet Explorer, whilst on-line, in order to access any secure sites. If you cannot access the Marketscore members area for some reason, there is an excellent useful free utility (SpyBot - Search & Destroy) which can be used to remove the Marketscore program from your computer (together with all sorts of other spyware and security threats). SpyBot is regularly updated and has won several awards for its design and ease of use.
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(Page Last Updated 3/5/04)
