Adware Report: SpeedUpMyPC Review

Product: SpeedUpMyPC Price: $29.95 Vendor: Uniblue Editor Rating: 3 stars Download SpeedUpMyPC

Pros
+ Ease-to-use and attractive interface
+ We were able to confirm modest performance improvements to memory speed and disk access time
+ Includes a variety of helpful system tools to diagnose performance problems
+ Considerably reduced computer boot up time
+ Automates common PC maintenance tasks that most people ignore

Cons
- Not needed if your computer is already very fast

SpeedUpMyPC Review

SpeedUpMyPC is an application that is designed to fix common problems that could result in poor performance on your PC. The application itself doesn't take advantage of undocumented or "magic" settings. Rather, it automates some of the tasks that an expert IT person would do to speed up your PC. We are heavy laptop users and are constantly installing and uninstalling software, so we were interested to see if this program lives up to its marketing claims.

Minimum Requirements

The minimum requirements are modest - most modern PCs meet them:

• 400MHz CPU
• 32MB RAM
• 5MB disk space
• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

Installation

Installation was quick and easy and the entire program installed in about three minutes.

Features

SpeedUpMyPC is well laid out and easy-to-use. The first screen you'll see has a prominent "Start Scan" button. Clicking this button will kick off the analysis portion of the program. This analyzes your internet, memory, temp system files, and internet cache to see if there are any optimizations which can be performed. This step took about 10 minutes, during which time the computer was very sluggish ... a good amount of time to get a cup of joe or make a phone call.

SpeedUpMyPC's interface is clearly laid out and easy to navigate.

We'll get to the results in the next section. First, let's look at the rest of the features supplied by this product. There are three additional tabs to choose from, "Optimization", "Clean Up", and "Settings".

The optimization tab has some nice charts which allow you to see exactly what's going on in the background. These charts give you the ability to see CPU activity, memory usage, disk activity, and internet traffic. Most performance problems are the result of CPU, disk activity, or memory bottlenecks and a few clicks through this tab can tell you if a simple CPU or memory upgrade will get your PC running faster.

The RAM monitor also includes a memory recovery function that will definitely come in handy when running certain older software products which hog memory and then never release it. If your performance problems are memory related, then SpeedUpMyPC will definitely help you.

The tab also includes a very handy tab to investigate and control your startup settings. It has been our experience that at least 50% of performance problems on PCs result from unwanted programs which start up when you boot your computer. This tab allows you to easily identify and disable these programs, thus reducing your startup time.

The "clean up" tab contains other tools as well:

• File Clean Up - identifies and removes junk operating system files that collect over time and slow down your disk drive.
• File Shredder - deleting files the regular way (ie: through Windows) leaves the data on your disk drive. The data can be easily recovered with some third-party tools. In contrast, using the file shredder completely and irreversibly erases files so that they can not be recovered by any means whatsoever.
• Uninstall Manager - provides identical functionality to Windows "Add/Remove Software" control panel applet.
• Privacy Protector - Eliminates traces of your computer activity from hidden locations on your hard drive, including cookies, temporary internet files, browser history, downloaded files, etc.

We should state that many of these extra features we've described above can be found elsewhere on the internet for free. The big advantage of using SpeedUpMyPC is that they are all tightly integrated within a single application. This means you won't have to hunt around the internet and then learn how to use the dozen or so free applications which collectively do the same thing.

Results

We're expert computer ourselves, so what we really wanted to know is whether this program actually provides any quantifiable performance improvements. We decided to put it through its paces with a popular PC benchmarking tool, SiSoft Sandra.

We ran about a dozen different benchmarks to compare our performance before and immediately after running SpeedUpMyPC. Most were unchanged, but we did see some modest improvements.

The first benchmark where we saw an improvement was in file system activity. We tested the data throughput both of the raw hardware as well as the effective throughput when running windows. As expected, SpeedUpMyPC doesn't make any changes to the core hardware itself, so we saw no difference on the hardware benchmarks. However, we did see a 5% improvement on the Windows disk access benchmark indicating that SpeedUpMyPC made a modest improvement to our system.

This is illustrated in our benchmark results below. Here's a color legend:

• Green - Hardware benchmark before running SpeedUpMyPC
• Orange - Hardware benchmark after running SpeedUpMyPC (1% improvement)
• Pink - Windows disk access benchamrk before running SpeedUpMyPC
• Blue - Windows disk access benchmark after running SpeedUpMyPC (5% improvement)

SpeedUpMyPC gave us a 5% improvement in disk speed

We also saw a modest improvement in memory bandwidth and latency. Sisoft's overall memory benchmark, the "speed factor", takes into account both of these factors. It decreased from 23.3 to 22.0, indicating nearly a 6% overall improvement in memory access time. While it doesn't sound like much, this could make a world of difference for PCs with too little memory or gaming systems:

• Green - Memory benchmark before running SpeedUpMyPC
• Orange - Memory benchmark after running SpeedUpMyPC

We clocked a 6% improvement to memory access time resulting from SpeedUpMyPC's tweaks.

In addition to the performance improvements noted above, we also noticed that our PC booted much faster than it did prior to running the software due to the removal of about 10 unnecessary startup programs.

Conclusions

We were able to produce hard numbers which scientifically confirmed that using SpeedUpMyPC resulted in some decent performance improvements to memory and disk speed on our test computer. It's important to note that performance problems can have a number of causes, so it's impossible to make a blanket statement over whether this program will help you or not. In our case, we ran the product on a relatively well-maintained PC that was not suffering from any significant performance issues. If you don't regularly tune your computer, don't have sufficient memory, or are experiencing frequent computer crashes, it's likely that you'll see much bigger improvements than we did.

Another thing we liked is how this product bundles many common system performance tools together. While there are dozens of programs you can find on the internet (some free) to optimize your PC settings, it can take quite a bit of time and experimenting to find the right combination that works. In contrast, SpeedUpMyPC allows for simple one-click tweaking with limited user intervention in a single, neatly organized program. Recommended.

Download SpeedUpMyPC

SpeedUpMyPC is an application that is designed to fix common problems that could result in poor performance on your PC. The application itself doesn't take advantage of undocumented or "magic" settings. Rather, it automates some of the tasks that an expert IT person would do to speed up your PC. We are heavy laptop users and are constantly installing and uninstalling software, so we were interested to see if this program lives up to its marketing claims.

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