TuneUp 2013: New Cleaning Features and Benchmarks (Part 2)

In part 1  of this series, we covered in detail the new feature TuneUp Disk Cleaner, and how it is able to clean 150 popular programs, and 28 Windows® features from unnecessary files. Now, let’s dive into detail about the other new features: TuneUp Browser Cleaner and TuneUp Shortcut Cleaner.

The recipe for a clean PC – Ingredient 2: TuneUp Browser Cleaner and TuneUp Shortcut Cleaner

Browsers are the next problem when it comes to keeping a clean PC. In fact, just browsing for a couple of hours results in several hundred useless files and data entries on your system, such as the index.dat, caches or ‘most recently used’ lists.

The new TuneUp Browser Cleaner now supports the most popular browsers, and cleans up all of the following:

•    Cache: Temporarily stored data of recently accessed websites

•    Cookies: Identification technique for websites such as social media sites or shopping portals. And while it’s a convenient method for tracking, it’s also a privacy concern. TuneUp Browser Cleaner allows you to protect cookies of your favorite websites.

•    Typed-in URLs: List of URLs you typed into the browser’s address bar.

•    Entries for the last selected download folder

•    Stored passwords: Passwords stored in your browser

•    URL cache: Cache for all previously typed in URLs

•    Data base: Compression of the browser database

•    Updates: Unnecessary update files (for example, from Aurora builds of Firefox)

In addition, the TuneUp Browser Cleaner supports a wide variety of clean up mechanisms for the browsers. Don’t fret, it doesn’t clean up files that were created within the last 7 days. This means if you’ve signed onto a website within the past couple of days and checked the “Automatically log me in” option, you’ll still be signed in upon your next visit. If you want, you can also uncheck this option and clear up everything!

The third tool in our cleaner trio is the TuneUp Shortcut Cleaner. While it was part of past versions of TuneUp Utilities, it was enhanced to find even more broken shortcuts and history lists in Windows® and programs:

In this example, it found some invalid entries in Adobe Reader that point to files that no longer exist on the hard disk and just confuse you when you browse for “Recently Used Files”:

If you follow our recipe and use all the combined tools we have to offer, it’s a very thorough way to clean up your hard disk.

List of supported applications

Curious as to what applications TuneUp Utilities 2013 really cleans up? There are a list of programs, features and browsers we support here.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series, in which we’ll walk you through how to set-up the software on your PC, and show benchmark results against the competition!