Over the past couple of months, we received a number of inquiries from clients about MacKeeper 2012, so we did some digging.

When it first launched, ZeoBIT's MacKeeper gained some very positive reviews of its all-in-one suite of file maintenance tools. It seemed like incredible value for money ($40) when you considered its anti-theft and space-reduction features and the service-based Geek On Demand which claimed to offer comprehensive technical support for their software and any Mac-related questions you may have.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well that may be the case.

Stories are pouring in from all over, describing how terrible not only the software is but also the company itself, ZeoBIT. Their marketing campaigns seem to be misleading at best, with a number of fake websites springing up to favorably review MacKeeper whilst also bashing its competitors. Josh Hoggan of Koingo Software singles out ZeoBIT as failing to live up to the 'Mac community citizen' standard and accuses them of taking advantage of uninformed users.

A lot of the features of MacKeeper are either already included on Macs, or readily available for free from a number of far more reputable sources. All it really does is take all these features and put them in one handy place and apparently the execution is pretty shoddy and leads to 'horrible system performance', according to a number of user reports.

For more information, do check out The Mac Feed report, especially the slew of comments on their original review of MacKeeper.

To effectively uninstall MacKeeper (the official uninstall process is yet another can of worms best left closed), there is a guide here, but make sure you've got a good supply of coffee and sandwiches before you start!