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TuneUp Utilities Review

TuneUp Utilities 2013 claims to boost PC speed, increase stability and give you that new PC feeling.  The TuneUp computer optimization program is an extensive tool packed with over 30 utilities to give your PC more speed and stability.  It also is capable of extending the battery life of a laptop with the new TuneUp Economy mode.  Also improved in this release is the Program Deactivator that kills unnecessary programs to boost speed for processor intensive programs that are resource hungry. Other new features include the new disk and browser cleaning tools that can eliminate files and temporary data from more than 150 popular programs, 25 Windows features and 25 Web browsers, to protect against PC performance problems resulting from system use.  

The following review is of an older version, See a review of the newest version here.

The Computer being used for this review of TuneUp is an older Dell D620 laptop running Windows Vista and powered with the Intel Core 2 T2700 processor and 2 Gigs of RAM.  Not too shabby in its day but the days have seemed to take some of the performance away.  Let’s see if TuneUp Utilities can breathe some new life into it and bring it back to its optimal performance.  

This particular computer has a few issues that maybe this program can help with.  The boot time seems painfully slow and the C drive is dangerously low on disk space.  There are only 2.34 Gigabytes of free space and it boots up to a usable desktop in about 70 seconds.

 Here is a shot of the drive space available:

Here is the Task Manager 5 minutes into boot time after everything has settled down:

The first screen you will see when launching TuneUp welcomes you to TuneUp Utilities and recommends that you use 1-Click Maintenance to fully optimize the PC.  There is a big button that says to Start Analysis now, so I clicked it. 

When it was done analyzing the computer, it shows a detailed analysis of the problems found and what is recommended to fix those problems.  You can also show the in depth details of everything found and choose not to fix those problems.  This screen shows that this PC has 263 Registry problems, 33 broken shortcuts, 7 recommendations to speed up the startup and shutdown process and can also free up almost 2 Gigabytes of space by deleting unnecessary files without damaging the system.  I can’t believe that it actually found 2 gigs to delete!  I have used this product in the past and I trust it so I smacked the Run Maintenance button.

When it was done, it told me so.  I was given the option to go to the Start Center and this is what I found:

As you can see, TuneUp Utilities shows that 43% of optimization progress is achieved at this time.  I have a few things that need my attention such as filling out the PC usage profile and 6 other problems were found.  I also can configure the Turbo and Economy modes and run the Program Deactivator.  After going through all of the recommendations, I was told that my Optimization Status is at 100% and at the present time I have extensively used the optimization options for this system.  That must be a good thing.   It was all pretty straightforward and only took a few minutes.

You can also see an overview of all of the functions TuneUp Utilities can perform.  This screen allows you to customize Windows, Restore deleted files, Undo Changes made and configure everything available in the optimization program.  There are a lot of things to play with if you want to get geeky but still very easy to use as for the average computer user.

A clean boot gave me a usable desktop in 1 minute flat.  That is 10 seconds quicker than before running the program.  The Windows Task Manager tells a bit of a story as well.  The system shows less Handles, Threads and Processes, a smaller Page File and more Free Physical Memory. 

This shows the drive space gained:

TuneUp Utilities is an easy to use computer optimization utility with many tools to keep a computer fast and reliable.  Works good for the average user and has enough extra tools to keep the geeky side of us happy as well.  TuneUp works as it claims to, comes with a lot of extras and is fairly priced.  For those reasons, TuneUp Utilities gets an honorable Brontobyte on a scale from bytes to Brontobytes.  This is a recommended tool to have in your toolbox.