New Software Reboots Slow Computers

By Broadside Staff Writer Dylan Hares

PC Tune-Up by Large Software provides service we all wish we had at the crucial moment when the paper is due and the computer is slow.

PC Tune-up is able to “revive” a computer—keeping you from having to format, worry, or buy a new one. It does helpful things like back-up, fix registry errors, defragment your hard drive, and optimize your computer’s performance. It does all of these things with the click of a mouse and since the software came with some impressive features, I decided to give it a try.

Reviews of the product online are generally scathing and many users have complained about the product’s performance with Windows Vista—my current operating system. Despite the condescending remarks and the blatant warnings, I went ahead with my usage of the product.

The installation process was simple enough and activation and registration was as easy as one would expect. Step one on their “Quick Start” guide was to backup my registry. I did that, even though I feel like I didn’t need to since my new Dell laptop comes with a hard drive partition that has backups of my registry in case something goes wrong. It was a quick process and while feeling a little unnecessary, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Step two was to scan for problems in the hard drive and registry. Naturally, they offer a quick scan and a more thorough scan and I opted for the latter. Almost as soon as it started, the program crashed and I was greeted with error messages galore. There were no major repercussions, but it was a minor annoyance and something to be taken into consideration.

Next, I restarted the program and opted for the less thorough scan which found 180 “high priority” problems. There’s a simple button that says “Fix Everything” so I pushed that and all the red x’s turned into green check marks which I know to be the universal sign that everything is fine.

Step four was defragmentation of broken or useless files on the hard drive and the program did this step in record time (compared to the time it takes any Windows defragger to defrag—much less calculate—any given hard drive). All of the aforementioned steps were accomplished by very accessible buttons and took very little time or CPU power to accomplish so I could surf the web or write up articles while my computer was being revitalized.

Following step four, I re-booted my computer upon request anticipating a slightly faster computer. When the computer re-awoke, the program ran another scan and defragmentation and restarted my computer again. When it reawaked, I re-booted my computer and found that it was slightly more alert—much like it had just taken a good power-nap, but since my computer is brand new, I didn’t really feel like it had been completely effective.

Therefore, I loaded the program onto an old desktop I have that runs with Windows XP and went through all of the aforementioned steps with the aforementioned experience and the more thorough scan, which worked on that computer and found 247 problems. The program fixed all the problems and did an impressive amount of hard-drive compression in the defragmentation and when it re-booted twice I was really excited because this computer runs notoriously slow. Fortunately, it definitely seemed to run faster and was a lot more responsive to what I wanted to do. I was very impressed with the job that it did on this old machine and it actually isn’t a chore to use anymore.

I wouldn’t recommend PC Tune-up for the average college student and his or her new laptop. New laptops are running about as fast as they ever will, so there’s really no need to worry about it. If you have an old computer that is rather sluggish, I would definitely recommend PC Tune-Up because it works exactly like it advertises. It is very easy to use and extremely computer-friendly, and is much easier than the rigmarole of formatting the hard-drive.