What happens when you take a clutch of cluttered old PCs, install four Windows optimizers, and check for improvements? We did that, and the results of our tests surprised us.
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Most PC users know that to speed up an old system, you need to spring for new hardware: RAM, a graphics card, or a CPU. If you're not ready to make an investment and crack open the case, however, system-cleanup utilities are enticing. They promise to pry off all the digital barnacles that have collected on your PC and on Windows, remaking it into the spry system you remember from the day you first set it up.
But do cleanup utilities really improve system performance? Or are they the digital equivalent of a placebo (your PC only seems faster because you've invested $40 and a half hour on a utility, and you don't want to think you've wasted your money and time)? The PCWorld Labs tested such programs to settle once and for all whether they significantly speed up computers.
We dug up five well-used PCs of various specs and generations, and ran four popular Windows cleanup utilities--Ashampoo WinOptimizer ($40 for version 7), Iolo System Mechanic ($40 for version 10), Piriform CCleaner (free), and 360Amigo System Speedup (free version)--on all of them. The result? In most cases the cleanup utilities scarcely made a difference in overall system performance, and in a few instances they actually made things slower--though they did shave a few seconds off the test machines' startup times. Read on for our in-depth findings.
The Testing Process
Each of these utilities promises to make Windows run faster by optimizing and maintaining your system, so we decided to use our WorldBench 6 benchmarking suite to test the performance claims. Unlike artificial benchmarks, WorldBench 6 is based on timed scripted tasks in common programs such as Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Photoshop. If you were to see any performance benefits from running these cleaning utilities, they'd likely show up in WorldBench 6. (We disabled WorldBench's defragmentation routines to give each cleanup utility a chance to use its own, if it had one.)
Obviously, we couldn't use pristine PCs to test the utilities, since they wouldn't have any crud to clean. So we collected five systems of different ages that had one thing in common: wear and tear. The test PCs were a Dell Latitude D520 laptop (1.66GHz Core Duo T2300, 512MB RAM, Windows XP Professional 32-bit), a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop (1.6GHz Core Duo T2050, 1GB RAM, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit), a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge laptop (1.3GHz Core 2 Duo U7300, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional 32-bit), a Toshiba Satellite M645-S4055 laptop (2.4GHz Core i5-M450, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit), and a custom-built desktop that we frequently use in the Labs (2.4GHz Athlon 64 4000+, 3GB RAM, Windows XP Professional 32-bit). Each of these five PCs had endured months, if not years, of frequent usage without even a light dusting, much less a comprehensive system scrubbing or Windows reinstall. In short, they were exactly the kind of PCs that most people would want to run a cleanup utility on. More
