Gizmo's Freeware Reviews: Best Free PC Tune-up Utility - Gizmos Freeware reviews: Best Free

15 April 2012
by Thirteenth

Introduction

PC Tune-up utilities are a great way to get a performance bump for your PC without upgrading hardware. They can repair issues that cause instability or BSOD (blue screen of death). Lastly, these utilities can also help make your PC more secure by removing traces of personal information. PC tune-up utilities should be part of your overall PC maintenance strategy, which should also include firewall, anti-spyware, anti-virus and defragmenter. Tune-up utilities are just as necessary as getting a car serviced, washed and vacumed. As each of these automotive services relate to a different part of an auto's maintenance, so do Tune-up utilities.

For the most part, they are suites, a collection of modules which address most common problem areas and or potential trouble spots found on PCs. Stand-alone utilities focus on one or two specific areas. There are a variety of tasks tune-up programs can do, such as cleaning temp files, removing incorrect registry entries, ensuring privacy by deleting traces of information left by Internet sessions and more, including memory, Internet and other more advanced tweaks. "General Purpose" tune-up suites clean and remove identifiable issues; some with greater detection effictiveness and granularity than others. They generally do not add anything other than their program files required to run. A good general purpose suite will attempt to keep your PC running smooth and fast, while at the same time protecting you from yourself (self inflicted user errors while attempting to use the utilitiy improperly or beyond your ability).

Additionally, most suites are tested to insure compatibility between modules and some offer one-button . Hopefully you will be happy with the automatic mode in the suite and won't venture too far into the woods without knowing exactly where you are going. The downside of a suite is that while each suite has its strenghts, not all modules are as strong as their strongest modules or "best of breed"; often stand-alone products from different sources can provide better performance in any given category. Venturing on your own with a collection of independent modules is more time consuming and more dangerous. While performance may be better, you run the risk that utilities from different sources may be incompatible, causing conflicts, errors or undoing what another utility has already done well. If you are unfamiliar with these different tools or modules, or don't understand the documentation or language used, you may inadvertantly venture beyond your knowledge level.

In summary, suites may be easier to use and do a better job protecting you from yourself, while not always at the top of the class in every area. Single purpose stand-alone products can be superior in performance but generally require a higher level of expertise and increase the risk of user error or conflicting application errors.

If you have never tuned up your PC, then you should see a real improvement in speed and responsiveness the first time you run these programs. However, on subsequent runs the improvement may be less noticable, if at all, but still a good idea to run regularly.

Ed. Previous editor included a reference for TweakNow Powerpack for power users, I will reveiw this and report on it later because it is said to have many features that if abused or misused can ruin your system.

Please note; no matter how sophisticated a program, or how experienced you are, whenever changes are made at the system or registry on a PC, you run the risk of causing harm to your computer. Before you start with any Tune-up programs there are a couple of common sense things you should always do to avoid most problems and provide a way to recover if anything should happen. Prevention can be your most valuable tool.

1. Make sure you have a recent restore point with Windows. Having a restore point can take the OS back to before changes were made. Remember, restore points do not restore your old programs or remove new program files, only the effects they had on your OS settings.

2. Have a recent back up of your critical data.

3. Read about the utility, reveiw the documentation, become familiar with the automatic vs. manual modes before running.

4. Check the options menu for your selected software. For example I am currently looking through Comodo's System Cleaner and they have an option to create a restore point before you clean the registry which is not selected by default. A good piece of software does a lot of the thinking for us if we allow it to.

5. Load a rescue disk onto a USB flash drive or CD/DVD.

6. If you are unsure how to accomplish any of the above, information on those topics can be found on this site as well.

Note: Comodo is more of an expert tool. T55 WinMate and Ashampoo not recommended to anyone.

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