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back to article PC tune-up software: does it really work?

Installing tune-up and registry fixing software was hit and miss when we tested on a five-year-old Windows XP laptop. Faster Microsoft Office and Windows boot-up times were possible with some software packages, but occasionally performance took a dive and a similarly priced Ram upgrade thrashed the rest of the field. PC speed- …

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  1. Doug Glass
    Thumb Up

    @the_madman

    "And before you start throwing out the, "Linux users don't like to pay for crap" argument, what do you think Linux RUNS on, air and penguin shit?"

    Short and to the point and one of the best comments I've ever read on this site. And when your OS is free, you maybe have that bit of extra money to spend on higher quality hardware.

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  2. Emil Larsen
    Go

    @David B & @Sir Runcible Spoon

    @ David B: Acronis 10 was used to re-image the PC for all utilities and both Ram setups.

    @ Sir Runcible Spoon: Startup times were measured all the way to the desktop + all icons + all taskbar utilities.

    For whoever talked about imediate-post boot testing, all the benchmarks were run in order before a reboot. Although I like the idea of mixing in some sleep-testing and running more programs at once with open-close-open testing too.

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  3. techfreak
    Pint

    Performance and operation

    Except for ccleaner, which automates some tasks that can be executed through a batch file, I see little value in these utilities. I use contig.exe in a batch file to defragment some files that get constant read/writes by their applications (e.g. outlook databases, guildwars, indexing databases for WDS, Google Earth), use the "defrag c: /b" on XP to defrag the pre-fetch data routinely, and keep the web browser cache to 64 MB.

    Something is definitely wrong with the test machine. I haven't experienced this level of poor performance on less impressive systems running the same OS (how about a 1.8 gHz Sempron with 1GB RAM?). I don't disable services, like indexing. In my experience, disabling some Windows built-in services slows down the computer. However the default settings on Windows Vista for VSS and Defender are definitely a problem; this seems to be addressed for Windows 7.

    My Golden Rule for good computer performance is to aim for a steady state system, as much as possible. I install a stack of carefully selected software, and try to not alter anything after that, except for patches and updates. The xBox360 runs Windows. Does it ever crash? Maybe it does, but not very often. Everything runs inside an hypervisor, and as such things don't change much.

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