Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #503 in Software
• Brand: PX Software
• Released on: 2009-02-20
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM

Customer Reviews

It Just Works
I bought Tuneup Utilities 2009 a week ago, its out already and im surprised Amazon does not have it in stock until late February. Anways, below is my experience with this program.

INTERFACE
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Tuneup has always had an easy to use interface, and 2009 improves on it yet again. Simple menu options and big buttons allow even the average user to feel confident in what they are doing. Its clean and simple and works very well.

EASE OF USE
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Another feature which Tuneup has improved in 2009. When you first open the program, it has 3 options for you -- System Maintenace, Speed, and System Status. These 3 sections deal with different parts of your PC and split it up neatly.

On first use, i clicked Speed and was given a simple questionaire to fill. Easy questions like my broadband speed, whether im using ethernet or wireless, if i like visual effects on my PC. When your done it scans your PC (very quick) and tells you where problems were found. Each problem is detailed so you know exactly what your doing. With a few clicks my PC was optimised for speed.

The other two options, maintenance and status are similar dealing with tasks such as defragment, disk cleanup, checking for errors etc -- all shown to you step by step with easy menus and detailed explanations.

FEATURES
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Here is what Tuneup 2009 can do for your PC

* TuneUp 1 Click Maintenance
* TuneUp Registry Cleaner
* Tune Up Shortcut Cleaner
* TuneUp Uninstall Manager
* TuneUp Disk Doctor
* TuneUp Repair Wizard
* TuneUp Undelete to recover lost files
* TuneUp Styler
* TuneUp System Control
* TuneUp Process Manager
* TuneUp Registry Editor
* TuneUp Shredder
* TuneUp System Information

BEFORE AND AFTER
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After running most of the utilities included with TuneUp Utilities 2009, the Windows Task Manager has a story to tell. Before running TuneUp Utilities 2009, the computer was using 438 Megabytes of available RAM, running 63 processes and using 784 Megabytes of the page file. After running the computer optimization utility, the PC is only using 379 Megabytes of available memory, running 52 processes and 536 Megabytes of the page file. That is quite an improvement!

FINAL THOUGHTS
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As you can see from the ease of use, tools it has at its disposal, its performance Tuneup 2009 is well worth it for the price. Solid recommendation.

A pet geek to keep inside your computer
If you are looking for a utility to speed up your PC, or a utility to tidy up your PC - actually, if you simply own a PC, then you need TuneUp Utilities 2009. I have been vacillating about getting a copy for months now and am gutted that I waited so long to do so. I am a previous user of Registry Mechanic (which is a similar sort of software), which was ok, but this is SO much better in so many ways.

Once the software is installed then you get two desktop icons, one for 'TuneUp Utilities 2009' which leads to the full software interface, and also an icon for 'Tune-Up 1-click Maintenance'. If you open up the main body of the program then it immediately starts checking your computer on the Start Page of TuneUp Utilities. There are three parts to this, 'System Maintenance', 'Speed', and 'System Status'.

The 'System Maintenance' part leads to the 1-click utility, and here you can correct registry problems, remove invalid shortcuts, free up disc space (mostly by deleting temporary files), and optimise hard disc performance (defragmentation). It will check all these things and then you can correct them all with one click, or you can go through and deselect items you don't want to be fixed (for instance, it tries to set DVD discs to autorun, which I personally didn't want, so I deselected that).

Clicking on the 'Speed' part opens up a new box called TuneUp Speed Optimiser, which is divided into three tabs: Overview, Quick Optimisation, and Performance Advisor. Here the program inspects your system and makes recommendations for improvements in the areas of system start, windows services, internet, system settings, and visual effects. Most of these suggestions I found very helpful and chose to implement (examples of things it changed for me were: stopping unnecessary programs from running at startup, optimising browser settings to suit my internet speed, stopping certain visual features of Vista which aren't necessary and slow the computer down too much). One word of caution with this section - it suggested to me that the time Windows (Vista) was waiting for programs to exit before shutdown was too long and could be reduced, I followed the suggestion but then found that I was getting a blue screen upon shutdown every time, so had to use the (very handy) built-in Rescue Centre to roll back those changes, thus I would recommend you say NO to that idea!
Under the 'Performance Advisor' in this part of the software, recommendations are made about programs you aren't using so could be removed, functions which negatively impact performance, and hardware (which suggests getting more RAM etc if it would be helpful).

The 'System Status' part of the software was the one which most impressed me. This checks the following: devices and drivers, windows, security, privacy, hard disc space, and windows update. When this ran on my system it told me that certain folders were accessible on my network and thus would be accessible to hackers (which I had no idea about, and had certainly never changed any of those settings from the default), and then secured them with one click. Again, any changes you make here can be simply undone using the rescue centre.

Moving off the Start Page of the software, there are multiple options (some for the more advanced user) to change registry settings, defrag your system (using its own defragmenter, not the windows one), options to clean up windows, restore files deleted accidentally, check the status of the hard drive, and to customise windows with your own icons etc (you can even change the boot screen if you so desire).

Finally there is an 'additional tools' section, in which can be found a secure file shredder, process manager, registry editor (be really careful with this one unless you really know what you're doing!), and a system information utility.

I really am very very impressed with this software and can't recommend it highly enough. It explains everything in simple terms and fixes problems for you with a mouse click. I like to think of it as having installed a pet geek in my computer. You need this software. Buy it today.

Gets you to clean areas you thought you couldn't reach!
There are two sides to this program.

The one stop shop side (One click tuneup) which you can schedule to run automatically at chosen intervals and also you can just choose to run at any time in between if you so wish. This is for the "non-expert" PC user, who just wants a piece of software that can keep his/her computer reasonably well tuned up and performing to nearly its best without having to go digging around the rest of the program to perhaps more "manual" cleaning of the computer. It gets rid of things like temp files, compacts files, defrags, cleans up registry and so on.

The second side to the software is the list of more manual tuning options. These range from, running the individual options (some of which are already in the one click tune up mentioned above) which allow you to decide which functions and areas of the PC to "tune up" but also contains a memory tune up option which is real time. There are however some more "invasive" routines which will get to back-up areas of the PC which i didn't know I could get to nor that I knew existed. Such as cleaning up batches of back-up files and restore points which are old and not needed anymore. That option gave me back 6Gb of space on its own! Also some further registry and start-up tune up routines which help to generally remove the background processes which I never knew were running and are annoyingly leftovers from perhaps software I have tried and decided not to bother with again.

The one criticism, I have, which stops me giving 5 stars, is the fact that one of the programs it runs on starting up the main program, which detects various "security" risks, gives the impression that the solutions offered will be sorted by the software, however when you click, nothing happens, it just gives you what could happen if you didn't take care of that issue. So unless you are an expert and know exactly what that piece of advice entails in terms of fixing it, then you could be left wondering what to do. I just searched for the terminology on Google and found the answers of how to change the various things it recommended and also to decide which were not worth the hassle in terms of the long winded way in which you might have to go about it. You do need to do some manual amendments of registry items for some of the recommendations.

So all in all, this TuneUp Utilities 2009 package should keep experts and no experts happy. To get the most improvement you do need to use the full extent of the software, so in my opinion the one click option only gets 80% there. You need to use the expert mode to get close to 100% of possible performance. I have noticed significant improvements, particularly when starting up the computer and when opening multiple programs/windows.

I'm happy with it.