Sign-up for a free PC-Doctor Toolbox Remote account and get 5 FREE Toolbox license keys for personal use, with an option to purchase additional license keys for only $5.
Why is Toolbox free? How long will I have access to the software?
PC-Doctor’s primary business is providing diagnostic software to PC manufacturers, refurbishers, and service organizations. We are releasing Toolbox free for personal use, because we see value in getting a broader set of users to run it. This helps us stomp on bugs earlier and gives us knowledge of how well our software performs.
We are also working on detecting more failure conditions before they cause computer downtime or data loss. This requires real world hardware performance and failure data, which we usually only see either in the context of manufacturers that bundle our software with their computers, or after the unit has failed and our software is used in the context of refurbishing or servicing. By having a broad set of users we expect to improve our failure prediction capabilities.
We are not looking to gather user or user behavior information, as our focus is on the hardware and the operating system. It is possible that some of the information we collect could infer user behavior, but extracting such knowledge is not part of our business plan, and we are not planning to use any user information for marketing unrelated offerings or selling it to others.
We are considering offering easier paths to buying upgrades to the system, such as adding memory or replacing an aging storage device. But we don’t envision Toolbox turning into a blinking bazaar as that would detract from the primary value that is outlined above.
As we add new features to our product, it is conceivable that there may be a cost associated with using them. This is most likely to occur for capabilities that come with an on-going additional cost to us that we decide to pass on. But we don’t envision Toolbox turning into a mix of free and paid-for features as that would detract from the primary value that is outlined above.
Once a product key is generated, it will remain valid forever with the system that it is first used with. The software that it goes with is also not going to be time limited, except for the requirement to share system performance information as outlined above. We don’t support taking a product key from one system to another. The product key requires periodic – not constant – contact with our servers, so should (in order of increasing severity) the servers stop working, our company go belly up, or the internet go the way of the Dodo bird, even Toolbox Remote with a valid product key will forever try to connect to a server that isn’t responding, and at some point refuse to continue before receiving a valid response.
Currently Toolbox is only available for the Windows environment. It is possible that in the future we will also release a Linux version, but this is still some ways off. We wish we could create MacOS, iOS and Android versions of Toolbox, but this requires Apple and Google warming up to the idea of third party diagnostic software, which currently doesn’t seem likely.
Learn more about the features and benefits that Toolbox has to offer at https://www.pc-doctor.com/toolbox.
