We’ve always talked about performance on this blog, but we’ve never really addressed one major threat for your PC’s speed; viruses, Trojans, worms, rootkits…we all know they’re a security risk, but a lot of them actually have a severe effect on PC performance. In this week’s post, we’ll learn what kind of impact viruses have on PC, laptop or tablet speed and how you’ll be able to trace slow performance back to an infection.

How I Found (and Fought) A Performance-Sapping Virus

Is your system performing slowly all of a sudden? It may not be because of poor system settings or third-party applications, but because of one dreaded event: a virus infection.

A couple of weeks ago, I did some research on how software pirates pirate our own product – TuneUp Utilities 2013 – and what they say about us in general (which is actually really nice – we know that most of them love the product and actually pay). I deliberately set out to find illegal copies of TuneUp Utilities, but what I really wanted to know was how they hack our product; whether it is through key generation or file exploits. Being the security nerd I am, I extracted these files one by one, on a spare Windows 8 machine that didn’t have much on it and which I disconnected from the web. Fast forward a couple of days: I turned on the machine, and the fans of the system were in full gear! Something was keeping the computer busy and slowing everything down a crawl. Windows showed that when 100 percent charged, there was only 59 minutes of battery life left. When I looked at Task-Manager and sorted the list of applications by their use of CPU resources, I noticed this littler bugger engulfing all of my CPU performance.
A “rss.exe” (with a proper RSS feed icon) constantly consumed between 80 and 99 percent of my CPU’s performance.  Since I didn’t have any antivirus software — with the exception of the outdated, built-in one running — it went undetected. I right-clicked on “rss.exe,” and selected “Open file location.” From there, I was able to trace the virus back to an Adobe Flash file; but isn’t this a proper file from Adobe Flash? Why would Flash run an RSS reader?ed, there was only 59 minutes of battery life left. When I looked at Task-Manager and sorted the list of applications by their use of CPU resources, I noticed this littler bugger engulfing all of my CPU performance.

A quick online search revealed this was in fact, a virus. I immediately closed the process, and deleted the file and the contents of the folder.  After I restarted my computer, I received this message:

I didn’t want to take any risks, so I downloaded and installed AVG Internet Security 2013,  and sure enough, it found something.

It certainly didn’t take me long to catch a virus with these illegal downloads. They’re everywhere, and you’re certainly gambling with your PC’s security if you blindly open these files, especially if your virus scanner is not up-to-date.

From Our Labs: How Viruses Can Slow Down Your PC to a Crawl

Curious to see how slow the PC had become, I put it through some of my intense lab tests, to give you a sense of what kind of an effect a virus has on a fairly quick system. The test bed I used it on was an Ultrabook with a Core i7 1.8 GHz processor, 4GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD drive a fairly quick laptop. As usual, this machine was specifically designed for lab tests, and is in compliance with the official Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Central guidelines. All tests were performed three times in a row to avoid any discrepancies.  

Test A – Converting a large, 220 MB MP3 file into AAC with iTunes What better way to measure how that virus affects CPU performance than by converting a two-hour audiobook (a 220 MB MP3 file) into AAC format using iTunes? How did our test candidates fare?

Yikes! Turns out, converting the audio file with the virus hogging all of the resources took nearly seven times as long. The reason is, the virus made sure it was running at the highest possible priority in Windows, consuming nearly all of the available resources.

Test B – Launching a Program (Corel PaintShop Pro X5)

PaintShop Pro is one of my favorite photo editing tools, and usually only takes a couple of seconds to load, due to several plug-ins and a lot of saved files.    

To get specific measures, I didn’t just use my stopwatch, but rather, AppTimer, which gave me results down to the millisecond.

With the virus still ravaging the system, it took 17 seconds to launch the photo editing suite, all three times I performed the test. However, when I removed the virus, it took only eight seconds to start, meaning the virus costs more than twice the amount of start-up time.

Test C – Battery Life

As I mentioned earlier in the post, the battery drain rate was horrible with the system drawing a constant 100% of the CPUs power.

This time, using my stop watch, I let the battery run dry three times in a row with the virus active and then, again, disabled. The results are mind-boggling.

Ouch! The battery ran dry after about an hour and a half as the mainboard, CPU and fans ran at their fullest. However, once cleaned, the system ran for almost four hours — which is its usual runtime — at the highest brightness and with the Wi-Fi enabled.

Test D – Temperature

The laptop got quite hot, but how hot did it actually get? In idle, the system clocked down to 1.6 GHz and ran at a 66degrees Celsius, which is not unusual for an Ultrabook. However, the virus increased temperature to 99 degrees Celsius. While I like to think PCs are stress-tested for such scenarios, it is likely to damage the hardware and battery, if your PC is suffering from such viruses over several days, weeks or longer.

Quick Ways to Detect and Protect Yourself from a Performance-Sapping Virus

Viruses aren’t limited to being annoying pop-ups or PC crashers. Some of them just sit on your system, completely silent and don’t do anything except slow it down. If your antivirus software isn’t up-to-par, and your computer is running slowly, don’t just assume you need a new computer. Chances are, it is working perfectly fine, but it’s a virus that is negatively impacting performance. Here are a few ways to quickly detect and prevent those speed-hogging viruses.

General signs:

• Programs start and run with a noticeable lag.
• There is noticeable lag when scrolling through websites.
• Games run very poorly (low FPS).
• You experience stuttering video and out-of-sync audio.
• There are two- to three-second delays when clicking through Windows (Control Panel, Taskbar, jumping through file system).
• Battery life on your laptop, Ultrabook or tablet is poor.
• The PC’s or laptop’s fan gets very loud, and the device is hot.

And, on an otherwise perfectly optimized system! If you find something…

• Immediately disconnect your PC from the web (unplug the Ethernet cable, and turn off Wi-Fi), and remove all external storage.
• Try to stop the virus with Task-Manager (if possible!) as I did above.
• Install a good antivirus solution with a high-detection rate.

Image credit: madmaxer / 123RF Stock Photo

1.  Get rid of old Windows folders if you’ve upgraded the OS. 

If you’ve moved to a newer Windows version, for example, from Windows 7 to Windows 8, you may want to remove the backup of your previous Windows installation, which can take up quite a bit of disk space. The “Windows.old” folder is located in the root directory of your drive C: This should only be deleted if everything seems to be working well and you don’t think you want to restore your previous Windows version.

On my Samsung Series 7, which I upgraded from Windows 7 SP1 to Windows 8, I was able to save 1.82 GB. The other machines were all clean installs of new OSs, so there was nothing to delete.

2.  Find huge files and hidden disk hogs.

This tip can, on some machines, have the biggest impact on disk space. Your hard disk is likely cluttered with huge files and folders that you probably forgot about. Let me give you an example of how I lost several GB and didn’t even notice it until I ran out of disk space.

Several months ago, a friend of mine and multimedia enthusiast, sent me a Blu-ray disc with menus, bonus features, pictures, etc. of his wedding. I wanted to take the video with me on the road, so I hooked up an external Blu-ray drive to my MacBook and used a Blu-ray to MKV converting tool to copy the material—with the best possible HD quality—to my hard disk. I ran the tool overnight but had totally forgotten about the MKV. The result: I had roughly 15.4 GB of a freshly converted video file sitting around in a folder called “VSOBLurayConverter” under “My Documents” (a Windows folder I don’t use!).

To find this monstrous hidden file, I first used Windows Search. I opened up Windows-Explorer and typed in “*.* size:>huge”. I selected the check boxes under “Advanced options” that say “File contents”, “System files” and “Zipped/compressed folders”, and hit Enter. With this search result, I was able to quickly see which files were taking up the most disk space. Unfortunately, Windows Search was able to find only a few of the larger files on the disk. That’s why I used another option.

TuneUp Disk Space Explorer’s “Top 100 files” feature helps organize your hard disk. However, I used it to uncover the largest files on mine. You can find this easy-to-understand view in TuneUp Utilities 2013 under “Clean up computer”, “Find and delete large amounts of data” and “Top 100 files”. Just right-click on a file and hit “Delete” to clean up your system.

Using both Windows Search and the TuneUp Disk Space Explorer’s “Top 100” feature, I was able to find files again, didn’t know about or had no idea what their file sizes actually were. These included high-resolution photos or raw photo footage, TV shows and movies (for example, via iTunes), and apps and smartphone backup files, which are automatically created during the PC to smartphone synchronization process.

Hunting down these files manually can be a time suck. With TuneUp Disk Space Explorer, you can find such massive disk space hogs in no time.

Like I mentioned previously, I tested these more advanced spring cleaning tips on three different machines, to determine how much disk space they could save me. On my main machine, a MacBook Air, I got rid of 62.6 GB. In addition to the 15 GB video file, I found two virtual PCs (Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista) that I didn’t need any longer and that consumed another 35 GB. Plus, I found several large ZIP files and TV shows that I had backed up onto an external disk.

On the Alienware X51, I found several additional downloads for my games, such as Crysis Texture packs and benchmark setup files, that I didn’t need and ended up saving a total of 7GB. And although I rarely stored larger files on my Samsung Series 7 due to its smaller SSD, I still was able to find and delete 1.2 GB of videos and music. Hint: Always have a look inside your PC’s “Downloads” folder, which is used by default by your browser. It might contain files that you don’t need anymore.

3.  Clean out the Windows Search cache.

The Windows Search index is quite a neat feature. It keeps a database of program shortcuts, emails, personal files and more. Instead of searching the hard disk, it just browses the index and presents you with instant search results.

However, this database can rapidly grow and become corrupted over time, which leads to incorrect or incomplete search results. Clean the Windows Search index once every two to three months and rebuild it regularly. You can do this by opening up Windows Control Panel and typing “Search” in the search bar.

Click on “Indexing Options”, go to “Advanced”, and hit the “Rebuild” button. This will completely rebuild the entire cache.

As I put all of my main files onto the MacBook Air, the Windows Search cache clocked in at about 1.2 GB. For all of you geeks out there, the index is located under “%programdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows”. My Samsung Series 7 had a relatively small index of just 200 MB, so there was not much to gain, and the Alienware X51 had the index turned off altogether since it’s a pure entertainment machine and there’s no need for me to search through large folders.

4. Clean up dead shortcuts and invalid history entries.

Media Player, Office, Nero, Windows….they all have their own list of “recently used” files, which may contain dead links. If you’re trying to access such a file, you’ll get an error message. The same goes for a dead start menu and desktop shortcuts.

Thankfully, TuneUp Shortcut Cleaner can help with this. Head over to the “Clean up computer” category and go to “Remove broken shortcuts”. Let TuneUp Utilities scan your PC and remove all of the invalid entries.

What’s nice is that the software’s Automatic Maintenance tool, which runs in the background, or the 1-Click-Maintenance feature gets rid of such shortcuts on a regular basis and help you gain a few KB in the process.

5. Use Windows’ hidden disk cleanup tool.

Catch any data junk left over on your system with this tool. Unfortunately, the entire set of features is hidden by default. To launch the built-in Windows’ Disk Cleanup tool with all of its options enabled, you’ll need to create a special shortcut—right-click on your desktop, select “New/Shortcut”, and type in the following command.

Click “Next”, name it “Disk Cleanup Ultimate” (or any other name you would like), and then click “Finish”. Double-click on the shortcut to launch Disk Cleanup.

Check all of the files you would like to delete. If you’re not sure what these options mean, simply highlight one and read the description.

So what did I gain? Only roughly 100 MB per machine, since TuneUp Disk Cleaner already did a pretty good job at cleaning my systems. But, this is a step I would perform at least once a month to make sure my PCs remain in as tip-top shape as possible.

Spring Cleaning Completed

These advanced tips, plus the easy ones I shared last week, took me less than 30 minutes total to perform. As a result, my Samsung Series 7 was able to breathe again. Instead of massive performance drops, error messages and little (if any) space for my files, I had 32.56 GB left! On my Alienware X51, 95.3 GB was removed and is now available for games and movies. Most notably, on my main machine, I saved 104.8 GB of data. That’s what I call a spring cleaning!

Hopefully, our blog posts have demonstrated that system maintenance can be simple and pain-free, so that you don’t put it off for once a year but continually clean your PC. We want to hear from you!

How many GB of data did you save with our simple and more advanced steps? Any other tips you’d like to share?

PC optimization is likely one of the least common tasks to make spring cleaning checklist. Yet, the team here at TuneUp believes it is an important thing to do! And although it may seem like a tedious chore, it doesn’t have to be—I’ve outlined five tips for making the PC spring cleaning process easy and painless. I’ve also documented my experience applying these tips on three different machines, to show you the major impact spring cleaning can have on freeing up disk space. Let’s get started!

1. Get rid of old programs.
Part of my work as a technical writer involves installing and testing many applications. Unfortunately, I tend to forget to remove these programs when I’m done with them. But, uninstalling these applications is one way of cleaning out your system and boosting its performance.

Open up your Windows Control Panel, and go to “Programs\Programs and Features” to find the list of applications on your PC. If there’s a program you don’t need or haven’t used, simply hit the “Uninstall” button to remove it. However, it’s important to bear in mind that not all program entries will be easy to understand. What, for example, is Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition? Do I need that? Why? There’s also no easy way to figure out when you last used applications.

This is where TuneUp Utilities 2013 comes in. TuneUp Uninstall Manager can help you figure out what cryptic program entries actually mean and when you’ve used them for the last time. If you don’t have the software, install the free, 15-day trial version. Then, jump to the “Optimize system” tab, and click on “Uninstall programs”.

This will bring you directly to the “Uninstall Manager”. Now, click on “Filter list” in the upper right hand corner. This will bring up a list of programs that you haven’t used in the last four weeks (or more).

I found a handful of games, Adobe’s Creative Suite and some tools like FileZilla, Microsoft’s USB/DVD download tool and file transfer manager, among others that I rarely touch. Having gone through the list, I was able to save a massive amount of disk space (more on that below) and get rid of three start-up items that delayed my boot process. Hint: If you want to save even more disk space, use the “Large programs” filter.

As I previously mentioned, I applied this tip to three, very different machines. First, I used an Alienware X51 gaming PC, which is hooked up to my home theater rig and used mainly for playing Blu-rays and gaming. It has a large disk, although it’s slowly declining in terms of space and performance with every game and movie I put on there. I got this system last May, and it hasn’t been cleaned in months.

I also leveraged a Samsung Series 7 tablet running Windows 8 for this spring cleaning test—it suffers from low disk space; only 66.5 MB is left of its 64 GB SSD. I threw my main machine, a 2011 MacBook Air running Windows 8 with 10.2 GB of disk space left, into this experiment, too.

I uninstalled 15 applications from my MacBook Air that I didn’t use anymore and some games I decided I could also play on the Alienware machine—and gained almost 6 GB of disk space as a result. However, I couldn’t afford to get rid of any of the applications on the Samsung Series 7 tablet, but I gained the most free disk space (48 GB) by uninstalling games I already played through or didn’t like.

2. Clean out your hardware.
Physical hardware cleaning should also be on the top of your to-do list. First, you should get rid of dust bunnies in your PC’s case and fans. Every two to three months, I usually open up the case of my desktop PC and very carefully use my vacuum on all of the fans (CPU, power supply and GPU).

I use Q-tips with an alcohol-based cleaner to get rid of the rest of the dust bunnies. This is essential for an optimally running PC—if the fan is dusty, it likely won’t reach its highest RPM, which, in turn, means your CPU/GPU will become hot. This can lead to an automatic reduction of speed to prevent overheating or even result in a system crash.

I also routinely de-grease my keyboard, because after about six months of heavy typing, the keys of my laptop looked something like this.

Regular cleaning products don’t stand a chance against this. If your keyboard is salvageable, try Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser or something similar. While I couldn’t remove all of the grime, I was able to smooth out the keys.

3. Run a disk cleaning tool on a regular basis.
At the end of just one day of use, your PC, laptop or tablet will have accumulated a ton of junk. To get rid of unwanted data, the built-in Windows cleaner isn’t helpful enough. Instead, consider using TuneUp Utilities 2013’s enhanced Disk Cleaner and Browser Cleaner features to remove digital crud from your Windows system.

For example, one of the many locations TuneUp Utilities checks for junk is the well-hidden “Temp” folder, which stores temporary files of both OS and third-party applications. On my MacBook Air, that folder was filled with almost 8 GB of data crud.

Managing just that single folder would be easy enough. Unfortunately, there are old temporary files scattered across the entire disk. For example, Adobe Reader 11 keeps a cache folder for previously opened documents and fonts. Over time, this folder grows but is never deleted. Since it’s of no real use, get rid of it. Using a cleaning tool will ensure that you can quickly identify hundreds of these locations on your PC and clean them out once and for all.

With regard to my other two test machines, the Samsung Series 7 was able to breathe again, as TuneUp Utilities 2013 found 2.4 GB of unnecessary files as well as allowed me to turn off the hibernation file, which came in at 3.2 GB. The Alienware X51, the machine least taken care of, had about 11 GB of unnecessary data on it as well as a 6 GB large hibernation file. Since I either shut this machine off or put it on standby, there was no need for the hibernation mode, so I deleted it.

4. Get rid of huge Windows 8 apps.
Some of the new Windows 8 apps tend to consume quite a bit of disk space. But even when you’re running out, Windows 8 doesn’t proactively tell you to get rid of some apps or help identify those that consume the most space. To find this out for yourself, open up the charms bar and click on “Settings”.

Go to “Change PC settings” and head over to the “General” page. Look for a “View app sizes” button near the bottom of the screen. After a brief moment, you should be presented with the sizes of your apps, starting with the largest first:

Score! On the MacBook Air running Windows 8, I found several large games I didn’t play anymore as well as a handful of apps that I downloaded for fun and haven’t really looked at since. I ended up deleting about 20 apps, which accounted for 2.9 GB, from this machine. As I wasn’t really playing games on the Samsung Series 7, I deleted some news and travel apps that took up a bit more than 700 MB. Not much, but on a 64 GB SSD, everything counts, right?

5. Clean-up iTunes.
Most iDevice owners use iTunes for music, TV shows, movies, apps and podcasts. But, what they don’t know is that iTunes can accumulate a lot of disk space. My folder clocks in at a solid 16 GB—and that number is “low” since I clean it up on a regular basis. Here are a few ways that you can likewise de-clutter your iTunes folder.

First, delete podcasts and set a limit. For instance, I have subscribed to about 15 podcasts in iTunes. Each of these takes up 50 to 150 MB. Go into the settings for each podcast and only select to keep the most recent episodes. Older episodes will then be deleted automatically.

Also go to the physical podcast folder, which can be found under “C:\Users\Sandro\ Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Podcasts”, for example, because iTunes tends to forget to delete some older podcasts.
Frequently check and delete duplicate songs, too. This is unnecessary data junk in your iTunes library, and usually occurs and stays hidden due to audio conversions or accidentally adding a music folder you already have. You can get rid of these files by clicking on “View\Show Duplicate Items”, but make sure you keep the ones with the highest quality and bit rate.

Delete movies and TV shows as well. I tend to watch a lot of TV shows on my iPad, which get automatically synced back to iTunes. Since I tend to forget about this, I usually get a lot of 1-2 GB M4V files. Go through your iTunes library, and just get rid of whatever you aren’t watching anymore.

I’m also one of those rare iPhone and iPad users who doesn’t keep 100+ apps on their devices. My advice is to go through the list of apps and really ask yourself if they are needed or not. Perhaps, you could move them onto an external hard disk, delete them from your iTunes library and devices, and add them back when you want to use them.

Plus, you’ll see that, in some cases, iTunes keeps previous versions of apps. You should check “\iTunes\iTunes Media\Mobile Applications” for duplicates and delete the ones with the lower file number.

Don’t forget to clear the album cache, too. iTunes stores all Album covers in a folder called “iTunes\Album Artwork”. If your library is rather large, delete this folder to prevent it from containing too many covers and problems with displaying the covers. Don’t worry though—iTunes will immediately start rebuilding the cache from scratch when you download new music.

Consider getting rid of iPad, iPod and iPhone backups, as well. I use three iDevices on a regular basis—an iPad 3, iPhone 4S and iPhone 3GS, which I use as a media player. Every time I sync one of these devices to iTunes, it backs up new content, and for each of these backups, iTunes keeps a file and doesn’t delete them. Here’s what TuneUp Disk Space Explorer showed me after I enabled hidden files.

In total, iTunes backed up roughly 15.5 GB of unnecessary data from my iDevices! You can figure this out on your system by pressing WINDOWS+R at the same time and type in “%appdata%”. Hit Enter. Now, jump to “Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup”.

Within that folder, you’ll find several subfolders—each represents one Apple device. My advice is to back up these folders to an external hard disk and delete these if all of your Apple devices are working properly. If anything goes wrong and you need to restore your old data, just copy the backups onto your system and restore your device.

Phew! That was a lot. iTunes is, at least on my PCs, quite a garbage collector. Since I use the program on three devices and keep them in sync, I was able to delete another 22.9 GB of files.

My Spring Cleaning Experience So Far
These five steps took almost no time to complete, and did a sufficient job in terms of freeing up disk space on my three machines.

I encourage you to start the PC spring cleaning process with these simple tips and welcome your feedback on whether or not they made a difference on your system. Interested in tackling this chore further? Stay tuned for more advanced tips next week.

What most don’t realize though is, that giving your PCs, ultrabooks, tablets and laptops a cleaning is critical for keeping them in tip-top shape—and shouldn’t happen just during the springtime but consistently throughout the year. Why?

1. Today’s tablets and ultrabooks typically come with a flash-based hard disk. This technology is faster but sports a lot less disk space. For instance, Windows 8 tablets most often come with 64 to 128 GB, but the OS alone (Windows, user accounts, basic program files, recovery partition, etc.) takes up more than 30 GB. You heard about the Surface complaints, right? The fact is, even a few GB of data junk, which can quickly accumulate with regular use, can hurt these devices, the OS and their performance.
   
2. Privacy concerns are a fact of life, and they should be part of any digital spring cleaning. Every Windows version and several third-party programs do not cover up traces and wipe temporary files that may be full of personal information. This includes history lists (used to save the most recently used files) and entire error reports, which can store passwords or other sensitive information. Microsoft has commented on this issue, but in case of an attack on your PC, the less log files and traces on it, the better, right? I also wouldn’t want other users to snoop around in my “recently used files” lists and know what I’ve been up to over the past few days or weeks.
3. Application and Windows crashes also may occur due to temporary files in the user and Windows folders. It generally happens when applications try to access or overwrite temporary files that are in use or don’t have enough security privileges. Plus, if disk space gets low on your primary partition :C due to too much data junk, you can expect reliability to be impaired. For example, if PCs are cluttered with temporary files, users may experience difficulties logging into Windows 7 (Event ID 1509) or run into problems installing and even running applications. I’m not saying that cleaning out your hard disk will solve all of your PC problems, but this is an important aspect of spring cleaning that should not be forgotten.
4. Users can experience better web browsing as well, if they compress databases, clean out caches and delete old cookies, among other things. Ever had a delay of several seconds when opening a new tab? Or did you ever wonder why a website would return an “HTTP error 500” on one PC, while it would work perfectly fine on another machine? These are just two problems that usually occur due to browser residue and that can be easily resolved with the right spring cleaning techniques.
5. Cleaning out data junk doesn’t just involve deleting temporary files and web browser residue, but also old applications and games. By removing these and, in turn, freeing up more disk space, you should see a significant boost in PC performance. That should say it all!

These are only five of the reasons why spring cleaning is essential for PCs, and as I said before, system maintenance is really something that should be done year-round. Stay tuned for a series of blog posts over the next several weeks in which we’ll offer basic tips to revive your system as well as cover more advanced tweaks to make sure that even those hard-to-reach places of your PC are spick and span.

As we’ve discussed time and time again on the TuneUp Blog about Windows, daily usage of third-party computer programs creates temporary information, logs and other redundant, system-clogging files. This unnecessary residue can limit your disk space, which, in turn, can take a toll on your PC’s overall performance.

Back in September, we introduced TuneUp Disk Cleaner, a killer function in TuneUp Utilities 2013, and demonstrated how it could powerfully rid Windows-based systems of data clutter from more than 150 popular programs. Didn’t think it could get any better than that? Well, it just has.

TuneUp today issued a software update that allows PC users to clean their systems more thoroughly than ever before with just a few simple mouse clicks. Now available for download for free, the enhancement will ensure that file remnants from an additional 20 common computer programs (listed below in alphabetical order) can be quickly and safely removed.

•    ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition 11
•    ACDSee Foto-Manager 14
•    ACDSee Pro Foto-Manager 5
•    Ashampoo Burning Studio 11.0.4
•    Copernic Desktop Search 3.6
•    DeepBurner 1.9
•    Driver Genius 11 Professional
•    FL Studio (Fruity Loops) 10.0.9c
•    Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware 1.65.0.1400
•    Mobile Master 8.5.3
•    Namo WebEditor 9
•    PaperPort Professional 14
•    Photoshop CS6
•    PowerCinema 6
•    PowerDVD 12
•    QuickTime Pro 7
•    Tunebite
•    UltraEdit 18.20
•    Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11
•    VMware Workstation 9

We welcome your thoughts on our enhanced disk cleaning tool as well as our other tuning features. A clean computer is a happy computer (or really a happy PC user!).

Windows 8 gets slower with almost each and every installed program.

It’s an age-old and proven fact: the more programs you install on your PC, the slower it will eventually become. Plus, a lot of programs don’t just install on your system and sit quietly in the “C:\Programs” folder. Many of them add icons to the tray area of your taskbar.

They automatically launch applications after boot, and they add even more background services and scheduled tasks that are active in the background.

On today’s systems, a handful of these programs are certainly not capable of bogging down your system, but add a couple dozen of these programs—and you’re quickly looking at a massive performance, reliability and usability problem. Unfortunately, you can’t really avoid it. First of all, your new PC already comes with at least two dozen built-in applications that offer “value-add”,and you also need your set of programs. So how does Windows 8 gets slower over time and with each application you install?

Test scenario: 150 programs. 2 months.

Windows 8 has “RTM’d” (Released To Manufacturing), and although we couldn’t really put it through a long-term test, we tried to simulate heavy usage as much as we could. We installed 150 programs (basically a mixture of programs we clean up with TuneUp Disk Cleaner, a list of our personal favorites and some of the applications we installed in our 200 programs experiment two years ago).

It took us about four hours to install all of these programs, and I noticed a performance and reliability drop after adding the first 50. The test system I installed this on is no slouch either. I used a 2009 Core 2 Duo 3 GHz, 4 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD drive. It’s not a high-performance Core i7 rig, but also no age-old XP machine; its fast SSD and 3 GHz processor make it midrange.

Clean vs. 150 programs vs. optimized with TuneUp Utilities 2013

So, what was the overall impact on performance? Did all of the additional files, registry entries, background processes and startup items noticeably slow down the computer? We compared the performance of we experienced on day 1 when the programs were just installed with the performance eight weeks later after heavy usage. We were also curious to see if and how much basic optimization helped. For that, we used our own software including TuneUp Program Deactivator, Turbo Mode as well as Startup Manager.

#1 – Resource Usage: Processes and RAM Utilization

Before we jump into actual performance tests, we want to talk a bit about resource usage. First, we looked at how the numbers of active processes increased after we installed all of these programs when compared to a clean Windows 8 install. Every active process (idle resource usage, CPU spikes, RAM utilization, handles, etc.) adds its own weight to the system, and this doesn’t just lower performance but also puts a toll on battery life. For that, we had a look at Task-Manager and compared the number of processes exactly 10 minutes after boot. These are the results:

A clean install of Windows 8 showed us exactly 61 processes. Keep in mind that this number may vary on your machine depending on the driver situation and whether you’ve used Windows Update to download some “optional” components. Once we installed the 150 programs, that value jumped to an average of 131 (this varied between 129 and 133 with each test run). However, once we used all of TuneUp’s optimization tools (especially TuneUp Program Deactivator, which essentially pauses these processes), we saw that number go even below that of a clean install.

Memory utilization is another area where a lot of processes have a heavy impact. While one process that takes up 10 MB of RAM isn’t a problem, 100 processes are when today’s systems have an average of 4 GB of RAM. Keep in mind that Windows and your active applications could easily eat up at least half of your memory; add another 1 or 2 GB taken upfrom background proceses running, and you’re quickly looking at a low memory situation, which leads to Windows 8 swapping memory to disk and, thus, losing performance.

A clean install took up about 1.4 GB of memory (“Commit charge“), which included all of the basic drivers, OS files as well as the entire cache (SuperFetch). Once the 150 programs were installed, usage increased to a staggering 2.6 GB –this barely left 1.4 GB free and available for our day-to-day use. Keep in mind that, in average, a browser with about 10-15 open tabs can often be found consuming about 1 GB of memory. Then, after we optimized the system using TuneUp Program Deactivator, we were able to bring reduce the 2.6 GB down to 1 GB.

#2 – Boot Time (Windows Logo to Start Screen)

Could the 150 programs add to the overall boot time of the blazing fast Windows 8? Let’s find out! We measured the time it took from the second the blue Windows logo appeared until the moment the new start screen was visible. These are the results:

Boot time decreased to about 29 seconds after we installed the programs – that’s a stark contrast to to the quick 20 seconds of the clean install. Even after we turned off all of the programs, performance didn’t quite get back to to their original levels. What we really noticed, however, is that Windows felt extremely unresponsive long after we saw the start screen. That’s why we looked behind the scenes of the boot procedure using the brand-new version of Windows Performance Toolkit (WPERF), which is now part of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (WADK).

According to WPERF, the original boot time of the machine came in at an impressive 61 seconds—this was the entire time it took for Windows to boot to the desktop and load all start-up items and services and perform internal checks. Once we installed the applications, overall boot time decreased to a staggering 170 seconds. That’s thrice as much. It was only once I optimized the PC with TuneUp Utilities 2013 that WPERF returned a great 55 seconds.

#3 – Application Startup Time (Outlook 2013)

As we’ve previously mentioned, launching applications is an excellent benchmark for any OS, as it requires heavy parallel operations and tons of CPU cycles. Let’s see how these were affected after we tortured the poor test bed with the 150 programs installed.

We used the brand-new Office 2013 Preview and ran through several test runs with AppTimer.

Once again, the heavy load and constant CPU thrashing of all the additional third-partystart-up items, scheduled tasks and services reduced the startup time of Outlook 2013 from an “okay” 2.66 seconds to a fairly long 5.9 seconds. Good news though: Once we temporarily turned off all of the programs using TuneUp Program Deactivator, we were able to get startup time back to its normal levels (and even a tad faster, might I add).

#4 – MP3 to AAC conversion (iTunes)

Next up, let’s look at how these 150 programs impacted a truly CPU-heavy task. For that, we converted a 30-minute podcast from an MP3 into the AAC format. The results are here:

Luckily, we only lost  12 seconds despite the heavy load. Still, that’s an increase of about 20%, and if you’re starting to convert DVDs or even Blu-rays, we’re talking about a pretty hefty impact. Thankfully, once we turned off all of the applications and optimized the PC, these values returned to normal.

#5 – PCMark 7

Our all-round benchmark favorite, PCMark 7, tests the performance of actual Windows applications, such as the responsiveness of multiple browser tabs, notepad pages and malware scans. It simultaneously performs dozens of these tests and calculates how fast your machine is when conducting these typical tasks. We wondered what the overall impact on our Windows 8 test bed really was.

Due to its relatively weak GPU and the older-generation CPU, PCMark 7 showed an overall score of 1512 after a clean install. Once we used the machine for about eight weeks and installed the 150 programs, performance actually went down to 1151 points—the benchmark even aborted several times due to excessive background activity. The results also varied quite heavily because, during each test run, some processes were active, while others were idle. It was utter chaos. Fortunately, optimizing the system improved performance. It became more and more clear that even Windows 8 was not capable of putting an end to or even lowering the priority of these (mostly non-essential) tasks.

#6 – Battery Life

These days, to many users, battery life is as important as performance. That’s why it’s crucial to measure the impact on Windows 8′s (usually very good) battery life once we put the Core 2 Duo laptop through our 150 programs marathon. The tests were performed with backlight set to 50%, Wi-Fi enabled and the power mode set to “Balanced”. We played a movie, measured the time it took for the battery to run dry and repeated this three times to get exact results. By default, since the battery has had plenty of charge cycles, the laptop went dark after only three hours and 15 minutes.

Due to the excessive background activity (we could hear the CPU fan rev up several times as usage increased to more than 50%), battery life dropped from 195 minutes to a mere 145. We lost almost an hour due to these programs.

Windows 8 has some pretty nifty power management techniques in place, but they had no cure for the constant CPU, RAM and HDD thrashing that occurred with more than 130 processes in place, all fighting for the PC’s resources. Fortunately, optimizing the system reduced brought back the original values but even increased battery life by a couple of minutes.

#7 – Photo Conversion Performance

Next, we used Image Resizer to convert a batch of 20 photos with the resolution of 3888×2592 to 1920×1080. The combination of CPU operations and hard disk activity should prove how much of an impact the 150 programs had.

Yet again, the constant thrashing reduced performance noticeably – we noticed that, often times, the entire operation just stopped about halfway through, probably due to a lot of other processes fighting for CPU time.

The entire operation resumed after a pause of about three seconds. This happened three out of our usual fivetest runs. Once we turned off all of the resource-hungry programs using TuneUp Program Deactivator, activated Turbo Mode and followed all of TuneUp Utilities 2013′s recommendations, performance went back to normal.

#8 – Gaming – Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV with iCEnhancer 2.0

Surprised that we’re testing a game from 2008? We’re doing this on purpose—don’t worry. First of all, GTA IV is still a pretty bad console conversion that is sucking up a lot of CPU cycles and GPU power, even when running on today’s systems.

Plus, we added the iCEnhancer 2.0 mod to improve the game’s texture quality and lighting, and makes this look (almost) as good as a modern game. However, since we couldn’t really test performance of this resource hog on a 2009 machine, we performed the GTA IV benchmarks on our gaming rig, which we also tortured with our 150 programs experiment. Let’s look at the results before and after.

Even though we recently installed an overclocked ATI Radeon 7950, the Windows 8 clean install (combined with the latest AMD/ATI drivers) produced only 42 frames per second (FPS), which is smooth but surprisingly low. However, that number decreased to a near-choppy 34 FPS with the 150 programs active. We observed during the test run that in most of the scenes of the default benchmark run, performance was almost on par with the clean install (minus about two FPS). However, the average FPS returned was drastically decreased due to some processes cranking CPU usage up to 100% and—for a few seconds—lowering FPS to below 10. That’s unacceptable for gamers. Luckily, once the system was optimized, performance returned to normal and even gave an extra frame with each of our five test runs.

Verdict: It’s the same old Windows underneath.

Windows 8 might be the first step on a path towards a PC world in which apps barely consume resources and don’t run constantly in the background. Unfortunately, we’re still living in a world in which traditional desktop programs rule the market—and your PC’s performance! What was true in 1995 is still true today with Windows 8: the more programs you install, the slower your system becomes.

If your system is bloated with 50, 100, 200 or even 300 applications, it doesn’t really matter. Windows 8 will not tell you that your system is under heavy usage and will not recommend to uninstall or turn off applications. What we’re left with is a faster system when brand-new,  but it will just get slower and slower over time and with each application that adds services, background tasks, processes and startup items. This is even more noticeable on low-powered tablets or budget-oriented ultrabooks. Our advice is the same as it was two years ago when we first performed such an experiment:

• Before you install any piece of software, think long and hard if you actually need it or plan to use it regularly. If you just need it once, remember to uninstall it.
• Go through the list of all of your installed programs and decide if you still need all of them.
• Disable programs you need using TuneUp Program Deactivator.
• Clean up your system using our tips and our new TuneUp Disk Cleaner and TuneUp Browser Cleaner.
• Be sure that only the most necessary start-up applications load automatically when you turn your PC on

What do you do to keep your shiny new Windows 8 PC, tablet or ultrabook clean and fast from day 1?

Windows 8 versus Windows 7 performance shootout: Who will win?

A leap in performance?

On October 26, 2012, Microsoft will release its “biggest bet“. And while you’ve all heard a lot about Windows 8′s feature set and drastically redesigned user interface, it’s time to take another look at how the OS fares in terms of performance and battery life. Over the course of the last year or so, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, blogged about the performance and power consumption benefits of the new OS. It was all very theoretical, so we wanted to put his claims to the test and see how Windows 8 really handles CPU, RAM, GPU and the hard disk and how this translates into real-life performance.

Our Test Beds: A Broad Range

To get comparable results, we put Windows 8 through a variety of tests on several very differently equipped systems. We used:

• Two desktop PCs: We installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a desktop PC (Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz) from 2007 and a recent Alienware gaming rig (Core i7 930, 8 GB RAM).

• Two laptops/tablets: We used a low-powered Core i7 1.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM 13” laptop, which includes a 256 GB SSD, and a Samsung Series 7 tablet sporting a Core i5, 4 GB RAM and a 64 GB SSD.

We didn’t install any tools on these machines except for the applications I frequently use for benchmarking. As usual, I performed all of the tests three times and measured boot time analysis, raw processing power, and application launch speed. How do you think Windows 8 stacked up against its predecessor?

#1 – Boot Time Performance (Windows Logo to Desktop)

Early in the game, Microsoft promised to significantly reduce boot time in Windows 8. The new OS needed to go in and out of the “off” in seconds in order to feel more like the OS of your typical tablet or smartphone. However, Windows 7 was no slouch in that regard either.

Stunning! Even on the older machine with a traditional HDD (Hard Disk Drive), boot time dropped from about one minute to 33 seconds with Windows 8 RTM. And on our high-end gaming rig (which still features an HDD, albeit a pretty fast 10.000 rpm one), the OS booted in about seven seconds – compare that to the 21 seconds Windows 7 used to take, and we’re seeing a clear winner here. The results on both the SSD-based portable systems didn’t surprise us—we saw improvements of up to 50% when compared to Windows 7.

#2 – Startup Time – Applications

Application startup requires the HDD to read small file chunks quickly and the CPU to process a lot of information simultaneously. I tested this using Outlook, as it requires both smaller files (the Outlook program files) and chunks of a larger file (the OST data file) to be read and processed.

I used AppTimer to see how the application’s startup fared on the Core i5 Samsung Series 5 tablet. I also wanted to see if there was a difference when doing “cold” and “warm” startups—”cold” refers to the first startup of the application right after boot, and “warm” refers to subsequent launches, which are all completely loaded from memory and thus faster.

The results? A change in application performance was hardly noticeable when I actually started the program, but AppTimer (which I used five times in a row and averaged the results) showed a different picture. Windows 8 was able to reduce boot time significantly when compared to Windows 7 SP1. Whether this was due to improvements in the memory management or a more advanced chipset/HDD controller driver is unclear. What is clear is that Windows 8 showed some improvements.

#3 – PCMark7 – Office + Day-To-Day Performance

To test day-to-day performance, I used the latest version of PCMark 7, which automatically performs tasks such as website rendering, virus scans, photo manipulation and video editing. It should demonstrate how well Windows 8 handles these CPU and hard disk heavy tasks.

In all four tests, Windows 8 fared better than its predecessor—on most machines, performance increased by about 10%! I’d say this is quite an achievement given that it’s just the kernel, memory management and drivers co-existing better.

#4 – Gaming Performance

Now what about the gaming department? For that, I performed some of the benchmarks I recreated specifically for my gaming series a few months ago. Microsoft promised to make some changes in the DirectX and graphical capabilities of Windows 8. That, plus the optimized resource management should prove to be beneficial for games, right?

Let’s see how Windows 8 stacked up against Windows 7 when I conducted our favorite gaming benchmarks on the Core i7 gaming PC.

A mixed bag! While Windows 8 managed to squeeze a couple of additional FPS out of the system when Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV were running, it didn’t boost performance  ( even suffered a little performance loss) with Diablo 3 and Unigine Heaven. This might be caused by the early Windows 8 drivers, but this situation should definitely improve over time.

#5 – Copying Files

Let’s turn our heads to pure file transfer speeds. For that, we measured the speed when copying a folder (100 files, 1 GB) from partition C: to partition D.

The result: while the new Windows Explorer copy screen looks more professional (with a fancy copy graph) and allows you to pause/resume copy operations, it was only marginally better – but even an improvement of one second is an improvement, right?

Overall Verdict: Good Improvements, Some Losses

Windows 8 performed extremely well on all of our test systems (even the older one) and better than Windows 7 in most cases. Overall, we’ve experienced a performance increase of up to a solid 10% and a boot time improvement of 50%–which is insane.

Up until Windows 7, performance of a new OS was generally lower than that of its predecessors. The Vista/XP comparison comes to mind, and the same happened even back with Windows 98 and 95. The added feature set, immature or unstable driver set and often-times so-called performance-optimized “improvements” have resulted in a drastic loss of performance. This, however, is not the case with Windows 8.

On the contrary, the soon-to-be-released OS managed to not just be as fast as Windows 7, but also exceed its already rock-solid performance in many areas, especially boot time and CPU- and RAM-intense operations. Also, the driver situation is excellent—all of the major OEMs (Intel, AMD/ATI, nVidia, Broadcom or Realtek, to name a few) have specific, and final) Windows 8 drivers already ready weeks before the official release.

I can’t wait to see what Microsoft has in store for its next “service pack” or 0.5 release, which usually focuses on improved performance and reliability. Overall, I’m extremely happy with Windows 8 in the performance department. Unfortunately, it still has one major drawback that has plagued all Windows versions—it gets slower and slower over time. Let’s see how “resistant” Windows 8 is when you use it for weeks and install dozens of applications in next week’s blog post.

In part 1 and part 2 of this series we covered everything there is to know about the new features of the TuneUp Utilities 2013 version. In today’s post, we will describe how to get started, and reveal the finished product of the recipe for a clean PC. We can do that by showing performance benchmarks of how successful the software did against the competition! – The results are mind-bogglingly good!
The recipe for a clean PC – Mixing the Ingredients Together (Getting started)

To begin to implement the recipe for a clean PC, let’s begin by walking through how to get started!

1. Download TuneUp Utilities 2013 trial version here. Go to the “Clean up computer” tab

2. To clean up Windows® and programs, click on the top button. Advanced users should check “Show all categories” as this reveals the true cleaning potential of TuneUp Utilities 2013. Now check all the entries you’d like to clean up, but also make sure to read the description on the right:

3. Hit “Clean” to delete all unnecessary temp files, restore points, caches, log files and backups. Next, click on the “Open” button right next to “Clean up browser” to launch TuneUp Browser Cleaner. You’ll see an overview of all installed browsers (e.g. Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE) and even browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash Player and Silverlight:

4. And once again, hit “Clean” to get rid of all temporary browsing files that are older than a week. If you’d like to clean everything, uncheck the “Protect items that are less than a week old”. There’s also a neat “Whitelist” that allows you to protect cookies from your favorite websites such as Facebook or Twitter. Just check “Protect cookies from certain websites” and hit “OK”.

5. Last but not least, there’s our TuneUp Shortcut Cleaner. Go to the “Remove broken shortcuts” section and have a look at the entries of invalid entries and broken shortcuts. Even on my four weeks old Windows® 8 PC, I noticed several hundred “dead” shortcuts – and got rid of them by hitting “Cleanup” in one sweep.

Fortunately, you don’t have to repeat these steps over and over again. Once you’ve checked your preferred options in TuneUp Disk Cleaner, Browser Cleaner and Shortcut Cleaner, they’ll automatically be cleaned by 1-Click-Maintenance or Automatic Maintenance:

The recipe for a clean PC -The Finished Product

Our lab testers used the new TuneUp disk cleaning features to check how many unnecessary files and gigabytes of system-clogging files could be found on four very different test PCs. These results were compared with a competing product. On an Alienware® X51 gaming PC, TuneUp Utilities™ 2013 found more than 17 GB of unnecessary data clutter, which amounted to about 48,000 files.
The competing product only detected 4.3 GB of unnecessary data on the same machine, which amounted to a total of 20,000 files.

Even on a freshly-installed Windows® 8 PC (a 13″ laptop), our optimization suite detected more than 11 GB of worthless data (total of 20,000 files) that collected over the course of just a few days. On the other hand, our competition found just 8 GB. On our Windows® 8 tablet (a Samsung Series 7), TuneUp Utilities found four times more than our competition.
The results looked even more drastic when looking at a 17″ multimedia laptop which was reinstalled in July of 2011, and had since been used daily as an office and multimedia workhorse. Over a period of just over 12 months, it collected over 37 GB of unnecessary files! These were mostly age-old restore points and temporary files, which the competitors were not able to remove.
Overall, the new disk cleaning abilities of TuneUp Utilities 2013 are more powerful than before. Did you try them out? Do you have feedback for us? Let us know in the comment section.