Even the best-equipped PC can’t deliver performance if it’s “heart”—the processor (or CPU)—isn’t strong enough. Despite all the amount of RAM and the power of graphic cards, the processor is what really determines the overall speed of a PC. In this blog post, we’ll take a quick peek behind the scenes [...]
While Adobe Flash’s domination has been waning over the past couple of months, it’s still a very popular technology for displaying full-screen, high definition (HD), video streams, games, and effect-heavy websites. Despite this, Flash has gained a reputation for being a very CPU-heavy technology that slows down PCs and decreases desktop battery life. However, Adobe [...]
If there’s one thing that’s really important for PC users on-the-go, it’s battery life. Thanks to the massive performance enhancements in laptops such as the second-generation Core i7 and AMD FX CPUs, many users tend to look out for energy efficiency and battery life instead of just raw processing power. To prevent your laptop from [...]
Last week, I dug deep into Windows Task Manager and explained the most critical Windows processes, such as “lsass.exe” and “Explorer.exe”. In this second installment, I’m going to explain the more common Windows processes, some of which are important and some of which you can even disable to avoid unusual CPU and hard disk activity. [...]
It’s ready for prime time: Today, after months and months of research on our part, I’m very happy to announce the release of our brand-new TuneUp Utilities 2012 on friday! This year’s version upgrades your PC not just with an enhanced feature for peak performance, but also with a brand-new power management system that delivers [...]
Ever scanned through Windows Task Manager and wondered why there are so many processes running? Unfortunately, Windows isn’t really of any help: It doesn’t explain what entries, like “svchost.exe”, “rundll32.exe”, and “taskhost.exe”, mean and what’s causing them. Well, the TuneUp Blog about Windows is here to clear up the confusion. In a three-part series, I’m [...]
Does it take an eternity for your PC to boot up? Have you trolled the web for some tips on improving it? There’s some good advice out there; unfortunately, there’s also some really bad advice as I discussed last week. In this blog post, I’m going to finish off my extensive boot optimization analysis and [...]
Your PC worked perfectly fine the other day, but suddenly, it’s acting up. Performance went down, CPU activity increased, and your laptop’s or desktop’s fan is going wild—there’s clearly some resource hog affecting your system. If our tuning tips didn’t resolve your situation, you might want to look at Windows Task Manager (hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC at [...]
Boot optimization isn’t rocket science, however, there is a lot of false information out there. One reason for this is that many boot optimization tips come from the era of Windows 3.x or Windows 98, and no one really checks their validity anymore. In this blog post, we’re going to look at common Windows boot optimization myths and show you that most don’t effectively decrease boot time and that some are even dangerous.
It’s an age-old PC fact: Protection from malware, intruders, hackers, phishing and even spam comes with a loss in performance. We asked ourselves—is this still true in today’s world of super-fast computers? Have security suite makers learned any lessons from the past and reduced the footprint of their products? Over the past several months, we [...]
