Tune Up Utilities 2011 : Review

The well-rounded feature set and flexible interface in TuneUp Utilities make it one of the best PC system utilities around. You barely have to lift a finger in this PC system utilities application to keep your computer optimized with unique features like Live Optimization, Turbo Mode and Automatic Maintenance. Plus, you can take advantage of TuneUp Program Deactivator, a feature that’s one of the best at indicating which applications are taking up the most memory.

Management/Diagnostics:

At the bottom of TuneUp Utilities, there’s a status bar that keeps track of your computer’s optimization progress, how many optimizations you’ve completed and tasks this PC system utilities application recommends you perform. Once you have accomplished what TuneUp Utilities suggests, you will receive a notification that your computer is 100% optimized.

This PC system utilities application provides recommendations for increasing performance and fixing problems in its Status & Recommendations tab. Live Optimization runs in the background while you’re working on other tasks, silently increasing the response rate of your system and loading applications faster. Automatic Maintenance performs a series of maintenance tasks when your computer is idle. The only drawback is that your computer has to be idle for a certain period of time before this feature does it job. If your computer generally isn’t idle long enough, you'll have to set it to enforce maintenance tasks after one week, regardless of how long your computer has been idle.

This application’s best repair, defragmentation and optimization features are merged into the 1-Click Maintenance feature, forming an effective overall solution. You just have to click a button and the feature will do the rest automatically.

TuneUp Process Manager lists processes that are currently running. You’re given the option to terminate processes that may be hogging too much system memory. The Open Files tab lists open files and lets you find and view more information about each of them. In the Performance tab, there are graphs and data to help you track how your processor and memory are being used.

TuneUp System Information displays data about your system’s hardware to help you understand what components make up your system. With this information, you can more easily find information on repairing your system because you will know the specific model number and manufacturer for every piece of hardware and software.

TuneUp Styler lets you adjust the appearance of your Windows operating system while TuneUp System Control allows you to customize Windows settings. We liked TuneUp Styler because it provided more options for customizing the appearance of Windows than we were able to find within the operating system itself. TuneUp System Control gives you a similar level of flexibility. If you adjust something incorrectly, you can quickly restore its default settings.

Some of the changes you can make with TuneUp Utilities can dramatically alter how your computer operates. If one of these PC system utilities adjustments inadvertently diminishes the performance of your system, you can undo it in the TuneUp Rescue Center.

Repair/Recovery:

TuneUp Registry Cleaner scans your registry for invalid or erroneous entries in 14 categories of registry keys. We appreciated how fast this feature scanned the registry and repaired errors it found. It even gives you the option to check the registry again to ensure it’s free of errors. This feature doesn’t try to wow you with the quantity of errors it finds; it does a thorough job and only returns registry errors that are the biggest threat to your system’s performance.

TuneUp Shortcut Cleaner deletes shortcuts that link to applications that no longer exist or have been moved. You can choose to keep or delete the invalid shortcuts this feature finds. If a shortcut has stopped working because its application was recently moved, you should repair it rather than delete it.

In the Gain Disk Space tab, you’ll find options for removing unnecessary files, old backups and unneeded Windows functions. This feature doesn’t update its findings until you restart TuneUp Utilities. This feature is useful, but it would’ve been even better if it looked for duplicate files and offered a button to update its results whenever you wanted.

TuneUp Disk Space Explorer analyzes the data on your hard drive and presents it in the form of a pie chart. With these results, you can determine how your hard drive space is being used and free up space in overloaded areas. As always, you should look at each file thoroughly before you decide to delete it.

TuneUp Shredder securely deletes files and overwrites the free space they once occupied, preventing identity thieves from collecting your sensitive information. On the flipside, if you want to restore files you haven’t permanently deleted yet, TuneUp Undelete quickly recovers them.

TuneUp Repair Wizard corrects problems users commonly experience with the interface of their operating system, including issues with icons, toolbars and programs that no longer display or start. Even if your computer is not currently experiencing any of these problems, issues can sneak up on you, and it’s good to have readily available solutions.

TuneUp Disk Doctor checks and repairs errors in your drives and file systems. While other disk-error checkers take several hours to repair your disks, TuneUp Disk Doctor accomplishes this feat in minutes.

Optimization:

One of the premier optimization tools in TuneUp PC system utilities is Turbo Mode. This feature disables unnecessary Windows services, configures computer resources for optimal performance, limits the connection your computer has with external devices, turns off background functions and visual effects that are resource intensive, and postpones scheduled maintenance tasks and automatic updates.

TuneUp Program Deactivator is another great optimization feature offered in this PC system utilities application. This feature uses a measurement called load points to assess how fast your system operates, shuts down and starts up. Applications that are currently running or installed on your system are listed in this feature alongside evaluations of their usefulness and the amount of system resources they consume. When you disable an application with this feature, the amount of load points goes down. If you lower the amount of load points, your system is going to run, start up and shut down faster.

The Accelerate System Startup and Shutdown feature disables Windows services, settings and applications that were set to open when your system’s operating system starts up. Removing these default Windows settings can improve your computer's startup speed.

TuneUp Registry Defrag reduces the amount of fragmented entries in the registry, repairs structural defects and recovers unused memory space. TuneUp Drive Defrag organizes the data blocks on your hard drive to increase system performance. Both of these features analyze your hard drive and the registry faster than most defragmentation tools.

Ease of Use:

TuneUp Utilities’ ease of use comes as a result of its flexible interface. While other PC system utilities might force you to use one interface, TuneUp Utilities lets you choose between its tabbed and overview interfaces. The overview lists all the features TuneUp Utilities has to offer in a single window, eliminating the tiresome task of searching for the feature you need.

Help & Support:

TuneUp Corporations provides a user manual to answer any questions you might have about their PC system utilities application. They also have a frequently asked questions section as well as information on error messages and general installation or update problems. The resources on their website are primarily for installation and activation issues. We would have liked to have seen the customer service section on their website provide more information about the application's operation to enhance what’s included in the user manual.

If you can’t find the answer you need in any of these resources, you can fill out a contact form or call TuneUp Corporation. In our experiences with them, they either met or beat their promised response times.

Summary:

TuneUp Utilities excels in the areas of maintenance and computer optimization. Our favorite features in this PC system utilities application were Turbo Mode and TuneUp Program Deactivator. Turbo Mode improves your computer’s performance by streamlining system settings while TuneUp Program Deactivator increases how fast your system operates, including shut-down and start-up speeds, by disabling unnecessary programs that are slowing it down. These were features we didn’t come across when reviewing other PC system utilities. If you want to keep your computer running smoothly without doing any of the heavy lifting yourself, reach for this PC system utilities application.

Source :
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