Review: TuneUp Utilities 2009 – tune up and speed up your Windows PC
By John Pospisil
Almost everyone with a Windows PC suffers slow down after a certain amount of time. It’s one of the most frustrating things about running a PC with Windows, and when I received a review copy of TuneUp Utilities 2009 I happened to have two PCs – an older desktop and a more modern notebook* – that were both starting to slow down and were in need of a tune up. So it was with a great deal of interest (not to mention hope) that I installed TuneUp Utilities 2009 on both machines.
First up, TuneUp Utlilities 2009 is not a miracle cure. Basically what it does is fix up all the obvious things that could be slowing down your computer, such as:
- Fragmented hard disk
- Unnecessary background programs running
- Hard disk running out of space
- Problems with the registry, such as fragmentation
Of course you could try to speed up your computer yourself, but the strength of TuneUp Utilities is that it makes the whole process easier by providing all the utilities you need in one place, along with guidance on how to use those utilities.
TuneUp Utilities 2009 start page (click image to see in full size)
When you first load TuneUp Utilities, you’re greeted with a Start page that gives you a snapshot of where you are at:
- Maintenance allows you to set your PC so regular background maintenance is carried out automatically
- Speed gives you recommendations of what you should do to speed up your computer – basically these are things you can do to speed up your computer that you haven’t done already
- Health lets you know about threats to the well being of your computer, for example if some of your directories offer unlimited access to the network you’re on, or if your system drive needs to be checked for errors
On the left of the Start page you’re offered a range of options to:
- Increase performance – includes hard disk defrag, memory optimizer, registry defrag, speed optimizer, startup manager
- Free up disk space – allows you to clean up unnecessary files and back ups, and deactivate space hogging Windows functions
- Clean up Windows – includes registry cleaner, shortcut cleaner and uninstall manager
- Solve problems – includes utilities to check the file system, fix computer and display problems, and to restore accidentally deleted files
- Customize Windows – allows you adjust various Windows settings, including the look and feel of Windows, the Start Menu and Taskbar, and the network settings
- Additional tools – this includes a process manager, registry editor, a file shredder (for completely destroying confidential or compromising files) and system information
As you can see there are a number of useful utilities included with TuneUp Utilities, and the purpose of most of them is bleeding obvious, which is why I’ll just focus on a few highlights that I found particularly useful.
Hard disk defrag – there’s a defrag utility included with Windows, but how often does anyone use it? Regularly defragging your hard disk is one of the surest ways of keeping your computer running smoothly, so having an efficient defrag program as part of this package, and as part of your regular TuneUp maintenance, is essential. TuneUp Drive Defrag did the job well on both the test computers, but be prepared to let your computer work away for several hours.
Registry Defrag – along with defragging your hard disk, defragging your registry is a very important part of tuning up your PC, and this is a task that you do need to a specialist utility like this one.
Free up disk space window (click image to see in full size)
Free up disk space – before I ran this utility I thought perhaps I might be able to claw back one or two gigabytes of storage, so I was floored to find about 11 GB of unnecessary files on both of the test computers (you can see one of the results above). That’s a significant amount of space, and generally speaking, a PC does need around 20% of free space on hard disk to run well.
Start up manager – unwanted startup programs running in the background can really drain your PC’s resources and slow things down. Again you can turn off start up programs using Windows, but this process is clumsy, and you often don’t know what the start up programs do. TuneUp startup manager is great. Not only does it tell you what each startup program does, but it also sorts startup programs into three categories – necessary, unnecessary and “no clear recommendation”. This makes it very clear what can be safely deactivated.
While there are a number of utilities packages around, what I like about TuneUp Utilities 2009 compared to other packages I’ve seen in the past, is that all the utilities are nicely integrated, and it runs well even on older, slower machines (there’s nothing more that I hate when something that is meant to speed up your computer actually slows things down instead).
So will TuneUp Utilities 2009 speed up your PC? Chances are that yes it will, as long as the slow down is the result of one the culprits that usually slows down Windows PCs. Obviously, it won’t provide a miracle cure for hardware problems.
While there are free versions of the utilities provided with TuneUp Utilities 2009 either supplied with Windows or available for download, you’ll never be able undertake all these tasks as easily as you can using TuneUp Utilities 2009. And what I’ve also, is that having these tools and utilities at the tips of your fingers will mean that you actually use them.
If your computer has slowed down, and you’re trying to avoid an unnecessary upgrade, TuneUp Utilities gives you the tools and guidance to allow you to try every possible tuning tip to get your computer running properly again.
Estimated retail price of TuneUp utilities is AUS$99.5 (US$49.95 in the US). Sample software was supplied by Communique Software, which offers a free trial of TuneUp Utilities 2009.
*TuneUp Utilities 2009 was tested on a circa-2003 desktop (Windows XP, 3GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB RAM) and a two-and-a-half-year-old notebook (Windows XP Media Centre Edition, Intel Duo Processor T2250, 1.5 GB RAM).
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Read more entries by John Pospisil.
Stumble It!
June 7th, 2009
Be careful if you have a SSD instead of physical hard disk. No defrag utility yet put out can properly defrag an SSD drive. In fact, using one can actually seriously degrade the life of your drive due to the massively repetitive reads and writes that defrag utilities perform.
June 8th, 2009
I assume this software “tune up utilities” is like most, it will report numerous faults and fix about 5% if your lucky, then if you want the rest fixed then pay the price to register, personally I don’t have much confidence in them, if these offers were genuine they would allow like the top companies do, and that is a full working package with a very limited time before requiring registration,
I have in the past tested different packages against each other, and within a minute between them, only to find the last one reporting 2 or 300 problems, when the just previously used one reported something like 5 errors fixed, and 70 remaining, which would you believe ? .
June 12th, 2009
Great! At least now, I have the option to increase the speed of my PC. Thanks for sharing this post. I will no longer be annoyed with the slow performance of my computer.
June 18th, 2009
The reason why most companies don’t put out a “full working package demo”, is that the time limit could be disabled by hackers. Thus making it into a full working package.
I don’t care if the demos have limited fixing/cleaning until you buy the program. It’s time for people to pay for what they use, instead of stealing software. If you like the software, buy it, otherwise delete it and find something free if you can’t afford it.
In that regard, I do own TuneUp 2009, and it works just as advertised. Never had any issues with it.