IdHp.net – Style And Gadget

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Round-up Installing tune-up and registry fixing software was hit and miss when we tested on a five-year-old Windows XP laptop. Faster Microsoft Office and Windows boot-up times were possible with some software packages, but occasionally performance took a dive and a similarly priced Ram upgrade thrashed the rest of the field.

Some of the services Avanquest Fix-it Utilities 9 offers to disable can speed up performance

This time – in the second of our three-part investigation; we’ll be looking at Windows 7 in due course – we’ve tested the same five tune-up applications on a newer, faster computer. There’s a caveat: this computer runs Vista. That makes start-up time much slower than on the old XP laptop and the potential benefit of tune-up software greater.

The five applications on test explicitly say – in their advertising – that they will speed up your computer or, more carefully, they are “designed” to speed up your computer. Again, we’ve added a Ram upgrade into the mix to try and gauge where your money is best spent: hardware or software. The upgrade costs £30 and doubles the basic 2GB Ram to 4GB – although it’s only 3.5GB in practice, due to the 32-bit Windows limitation – and is a similar price to the applications on test. Read the rest of this entry »

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Round-up We love hardware, and if you ask us how to make an old computer go faster, we’ll recommend a hardware upgrade. But 34 million people opt for a software tune-up in the US alone, estimates Iolo, a company that makes tune-up software.

Iolo’s System Mechanic 9 does a good job of finding services you don’t use
Click for full-size screen grab

Can such a large number of people be wrong? We thought we’d take a look at some popular tune-up apps that explicitly claim they will speed up your computer or, when more carefully worded, are “designed” to speed up your computer.

We didn’t set out to see if these applications really could fix registry problems and related crashes because it’s difficult to objectively measure such abilities, especially as every program claimed to be able to fix more than 1000 registry problems, most of which were simply dead links and things like having Windows updates disabled. Handy, perhaps, but not as interesting to us as the performance promises. Read the rest of this entry »