5 Reasons Why Program Deactivator is Good for Your PC

By now, you’ve heard about TuneUp Program Deactivator. It’s the answer to performance and stability problems caused by having too many programs running at once. Program Deactivator works by turning off programs that drain your PC’s resources and once you need them again, turning them back on.

In our last post, we gave you all insight into how we came up with the idea of Program Deactivator. Now we’ll give you five great reasons why your PC can’t live without this great feature.

Reason #1 – Massive performance boost

The more weight you add to your car, the longer it takes to go from 0 to 60 mph. Unfortunately, that’s also true in the digital world—and that despite the fact that bits and bytes actually don’t weigh anything. The more programs you install, the slower the machine gets. You can thank much of this slow-down to the tons of services, background processes, and scheduled tasks that many programs like to spread all over your system. These take up memory, consume CPU power, and keep your hard disk busy. The problem isn’t having just one of these programs running, it’s that most PCs have more than 66 programs installed (see this recent study on typical software portfolios), and some even 200 of them (remember our blog post). This will ruin your machine’s performance, no matter if it’s a high-performance machine or a less powerful netbook.

See for yourself how much of an impact TuneUp Program Deactivator had on our totally bogged down “200 programs” system (red bar). The following charts are an excerpt of our benchmarks we performed in spring 2010. We repeated three specific benchmarks again having used Program Deactivator to disable 48 programs (green bar). We also measured the number of processes running in the background as well as the current memory load both before and after using Program Deactivator. Here is a summary of the results:

All three speed tests showed a significant increase in speed. We reduced the number of background processes from a 112 to 66 processes. The memory we saved allowed for far better responsiveness and much less disk activity. To sum up: using our Program Deactivator, we were able to get impressive results without having to uninstall a single program. It took us literally less than 5 (!) minutes to disable programs and achieve this kind of speed up.

To further prove the point, we actually clean installed the entire system (blue bar) and ran the tests again to compare the performance of a “fresh” PC with the performance of a PC that had been optimized with Program Deactivator. Well, almost “fresh”: We had to install the security software (antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, etc.) that was on our “200 programs PC”, since Program Deactivator does not disable any security related applications – which is a good thing.

The comparison proved the point: The fresh system was only a handful of seconds (!) faster than the 200 programs system after it had undergone the Program Deactivator treatment. The scan time of Microsoft Security Essentials was absolutely on par—exactly 45 seconds. The shut-down time of the freshly installed system was also only 9 seconds shorter than of our totally junked up system using Program Deactivator. All in all: impressive results. When we used the system for day to day tasks, we couldn’t notice a single difference between the clean installed PC and the junk PC with all programs disabled.

Reason #2 – Quick startup

There is no reason to wait 2, 3, or even 5 minutes for your computer to finish booting after you’ve turned it on, particularly if the delay is caused by programs you don’t want to use at that particular moment. Why should you lose precious startup time because of a program that you rarely run (but like to use occasionally)? There are already ways to disable these programs—we described two methods right here—but Program Deactivator is the only program that disables all three causes of slow boot ups (i.e. startup entries, scheduled tasks, services) at once. Just turn a program off and all startup and performance hogs of a program are gone immediately.

Using Program Deactivator to disable programs will decrease boot time

Reason #3 – Reinstalling Windows? No more!

It has become an annual routine for so many people. Your PC gets slower and slower until you just can’t take it anymore, so you do a clean install to get its first-day performance back. That’s actually an effective way to restore performance, but the required effort is just too much. You have to manually install all your programs and set it all up again. For many people that means days and days of hard work and long waits. And obviously the huge downside is, after a couple of months, you’re facing the same performance problem again. It’s a never-ending cycle.

But now you can finally say goodbye to reinstallations due to PC performance problems. With TuneUp Program Deactivator you fight (and win!) against the continuous slowdown of your Windows PC. All you need to do is use Program Deactivator regularly to disable programs you’re not using. And in contrast to reinstalling Windows and all of your programs, this only takes you a few minutes and usually requires no reboots at all.

Reason #4 – Increased battery life

Even by default, Windows tries to save as much power on notebooks and netbooks as well as on regular desktop PCs. Windows 7 is especially effective at this. It uses several techniques—like Idle Resource Utilization, Trigger Start Services, Timer Coalescing, and many others—to save power and prolong battery life. We recommend reading this Microsoft whitepaper that explains these power management techniques in full detail.

However, if you have too many programs installed, these techniques are almost worthless. Imagine yourself with 20 to 30 programs that are constantly running in the background, keeping the processor, memory, and the hard disk busy—or even using the network adapter and sound card on a regular basis. These programs effectively prevent your hardware from powering down or entering a lower power consumption state, so turning them off with Program Deactivator will save precious energy and even make your mobile computer’s battery last longer!

Disabling programs that you rarely need will increase the battery life of mobile computers

Reason #5 – Install as many programs as you like

So you love to try out all sorts of programs? You like to have five different graphics editing programs installed, just so you can pick and choose between the best features? Well, until now, you had a tough time keeping your PC’s performance up while trying out many programs. With Program Deactivator, things just got much easier. Now you can try out 10, 20, or even 100 programs and still have a fast PC. Just use Program Deactivator to disable them after you’ve finished using them!

This brings another positive aspect: You’re no longer required to constantly uninstall programs and reinstall them later in case you need them again. This saves you a lot of trouble, as you don’t need to look for the original setup CD, DVD, or download file to reinstall the program again—and we’re not even talking about the long, inevitable process of relocating the product key!

Convinced? Here’s how it works

TuneUp Program Deactivator is simple to use:

1. Just install the new 2011 version of TuneUp Utilities. You can give it a full featured test drive by downloading the 15-day trial from this website. Finished installing it? Then move on to the “Optimize system” category. Here you’ll find the new Program Deactivator:
   
2. Once clicked, you’ll see a long list of nearly all installed programs. Each is categorized by the load on your system: High, Medium, Low, and None. You should definitely check out all programs under the “High” and “Medium” category:
   These are the sorts of programs that create the most resource-draining services, scheduled tasks, and startup entries. Do you really need them on a daily basis? Because if you just start them once a month, there’s no need for them to run in the background 24/7, right? Same applies to all programs under the “Low” category:
   

   In our experience, disabling one of them will not result in any sort of (noticeable) performance gain. Disabling 5, 10, or more at once, on the other hand, will give you some nice results. You’ll be surprised by what you can achieve just with a couple of mouse clicks on programs you don’t use daily. Just take a look at the left hand side of TuneUp Program Deactivator and watch the load level go down click by click:

   The first graph shows boot-up load, the second day-to-day load, and the last one shut-down load—all three decreased massively, leading to a very noticeable performance gain!

3. Are you done deactivating your programs? Then restart your machine and watch it fly—you’ve never seen your PC, notebook, or netbook as fast as now.Expect more coverage on Program Deactivator, including a rather huge set of benchmarks to prove exactly how much performance you gain, and other new features of TuneUp Utilities, and what’s behind them.