PC Tune-Up scans your registry for some of the leftover junk that's inevitably left behind by uninstalled programs and the like, and also offers to add registry optimizations that can purportedly speed tasks such as hard disk access. But it fails to provide necessary info on just what it's doing so you can gauge its success (or lack thereof).
A user-friendly Quick Start makes it easy to run through four steps, for registry backup, problem scanning, repair and defrag (there's actually also a not-shown fifth step for optimization).
Backup creates a restore point for your registry, while a scan looks through the different sections of the registry for such things as pointers to files that no longer exist.
After a scan you can repair any found problems, but the feature-limited trial version fixes only a portion of those problems found and prompts you to buy the paid version to fix the rest. After a repair, the defrag step compacts the registry.
Finally, the optimization step offers to alter the registry for a wide range of supposed speed-ups, such as 'Access to AVI Media files' or 'Optimize the Cache Write Delay.' But you can only enable or disable all the optimizations at once, and the program doesn't provide any real information for just what it's optimizing.
And if you try to go to the program help for more details on optimizations (or any other aspect of the program), you'll be taken to a Web page that prompts you to fill in a form with your question. There's no actual program guide currently available on the site, though the company says it will be posting a short FAQ.
That near-complete lack of program help makes PC Tune-Up a hard sell for $30.
--Erik Larkin
Reviewed by: fredgarvinmp
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