Tune Up Utilities 2009 system utility

Thanks to the relatively high performance on offer from even basic PCs in the modern market, tuning and optimising a machine isn’t nearly as essential as it used to be.

But for those who do like to keep a clean house, Tune Up Utilities has been one of the most effective all-in-one solutions in the past and has recently been updated for 2009.

In truth there’s very little on offer here in terms of new features, with most changes focusing on a tweaked interface and tools that are already a fundamental part of the package.

For a quick clean-up solution the software installs a one-click maintenance application that can be used periodically to fix the Registry, free up disk space, remove invalid shortcuts and defragment the hard disk.

The bulk of control is found through the main interface however, with the wide range of tools available split into performance, clean-up, problem-solving and Windows tune-up.

While quite a few of these are supplied with Windows if you know where to look, there are some distinctly useful components here such as the Registry cleaner/defragmenter, undelete functions to recover lost files and a shredder to permanently delete data.

Many of the other tools, such as the uninstall and startup manager, process manager and system defragmenter are simply revised versions of the tools supplied with Windows, though each of them does offer a greater degree of control.

For those with older machines the speed optimiser and performance adviser, which can tell you which software can be disabled if it is rarely used, will be beneficial and even though there’s nothing particularly radical here, we liked the fact that the components are well integrated, easily accessible and could make a real difference to how your operating system runs.