Software pick – PC Tune-up
Posted on 19. Sep, 2008 by Mike Halsey in software picks
This one isn’t free but offers more than other PC maintenance software. I think it’s well worth the £20 or so it’ll cost you. It’s a doddle to use too as you pretty much just have to keep pressing a big Next button.
Like CCleaner, PC Tune-up will perform a variety of maintenance jobs on your computer like removing old and temporary files that clog it up and slow it down. One of the best features though is not only that it’ll clean unwanted entries from your computer’s registry but it’ll defragment it as well. It’s the only piece of software I’ve found that does that.
STOP! I hear you cry. I should first explain what a registry and defragmenting are…
The Registry – The part of Windows that stores all the settings for the operating system and your programs. When you change a setting, maybe you change your screensaver or change the scanning options in your anti-virus software, the settings are commonly stored in the registry. This is essentially a big database (think box full of index cards) that, the more software you install, will get bigger and bigger over time.
Defragmenting – As you create and delete files on your hard drive they leave small blocks of unused space scattered around. This means that when you want to write another file to the disk there might not be a space big enough to put it in at the beginning of the disk. What Windows will do in this situation is write part of the file to the first available bit of space, and put the rest of the file in the next, and so on so you’re files become fragmented across the disk. Defragmenting takes the pieces of all your files and puts them back together again, removing all the gaps.
If you have a big file like the registry that you’re cleaning up by removing bits from the middle of it, that file then ends up the same size but with big gaps in it. Defragmenting the file will remove all those gaps and compress the file to make it a more reasonable size and thus, faster to load.
I believe that defragmenting the registry, rather than just cleaning old rubbish out of it is a big deal for PC maintenace software. I’ve had some niggling issues with a slightly earlier version of PC Tune-up running on Windows Vista, ok it keeps crashing, but they say it’s fully compatible with Vista so I’ll assume it’s just the older free copy I got from a magazine. Try it, it’s really good. You can download it HERE.
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