PC Autotune Tries to Optimize Hard Drives, But Veers Off-Course

Performing regular maintenance on your computer has always been a good idea. Making sure its internal components are kept clean and cool is important to a system's longevity. Just as important is keeping your hard drive optimized, and that's a chore best left to a good piece of software. Much as PC Autotune ($25, buy-only) tries to be that software, it comes up short.

For starters, PC Autotune's interface tries too hard to look like something it's not: a vehicle dashboard. While the gauges might be recognizable in a car or truck, they really don't make any sense for a piece of software that helps maintain your hard drive. Take the gauge marked disk/defrag: it's marked 0 to 20%. Of what? I've been a technician for more than a decade, and I'm not sure.

The problems with the interface are compounded by the fact that during PC Autotune's maintenance routine the needles bounce back and forth rhythmically...but again, I'm not sure what they're supposed to indicate.

When the process completes, PC Autotune tells you how much space it managed to free up by removing needless files, but it doesn't tell you what they were or where they came from. I'd prefer my clean-up program to show me exactly what it plans to remove before even removing them, as Piriform's CCleaner does.

As for PCAutotune's claim that my system would be faster, I saw no noticeable improvement. My system's boot-up time was identical according to BootRacer, as was general performance once Windows 7 had loaded.

I do appreciate that PC Autotune supports scheduled operation, but there are much better tools available at no cost that can do the exact same things. For hard drive maintenance, I'll stick with CCleaner to remove unnecessary files and Auslogics Disk Defrag for optimization.