Product Reviews

It's no wonder suites such as TuneUp Utilities are so popular. Everyday use takes its toll on a family PC. It isn't just the games demos, either; 'handy' utilities downloaded from the internet - not to mention spyware - all slow down or break your PC. It doesn't help that Windows is no good at cleaning up after itself, while uninstallation programs routinely leave your computer with a sprinkling of unnecessary files and Registry entries.

TuneUp promises to spring-clean your system in one go. In reality, it's a jack of all trades. All the suite's components are launched from a single, easy-to-use interface, but while some of the tools in its Customize & Analyze, Clean Up & Repair and Optimize & Improve submenus allow you to get under Windows' skin, others such as the grand-sounding System Control and Styler 2 make mostly cosmetic changes to the operating system's appearance, as well as duplicating functions from Windows' folder options.

The problem with most of TuneUp's tools is that they are simply repackaged features that are already built into Windows. System Information can already be found in Control

ADVERTISEMENT

Panel; Process Manager is a ritzier Task Manager (and getting to the Windows' version using Ctrl-Alt-Del is a damn sight quicker); even the Registry Editor offers nothing that Windows doesn't. Some of Windows' features aren't immediately obvious, or are difficult to fathom, but in a suite such as this we'd expect at least to have a better explanation of their functions.

StartUp Manager, for instance, is simply a snazzier-looking version of Windows' Msconfig. It provides a list of all the software that starts automatically when your system boots and asks you to tick those you want to enable or disable. All it adds is the reassurance that a particular program is 'Trustworthy', although it didn't trust common applications such as Adobe Acrobat's automatic update. As with Msconfig, there's no explanation of what files do, even if they're standard Windows components, so beginners are left in the dark as to what changes to make.

The only really useful elements in the suite are the Registry Cleaner and Defragmenting tools, plus System Optimizer and the secure deletion tool TuneUp Shredder. Registry Cleaner did a decent job of weeding out redundant entries, but it failed to rid our test PC of tricky keys containing null values, which spyware uses to prevent their deletion. System Optimizer identified a few tweaks to improve broadband speed.

TuneUp Utilities goes some way to doing what it claims, but there's really not enough here that isn't already available in Windows, or that you can't get as freeware. Repackaging system tools to make them easier is a double-edged sword, and without any adequate explanation of exactly what changes you're about to make, the consequences could be disastrous.