Spring cleaning with TuneUp – Review and Giveaway

I have been blogging for over four years now which has wracked up a huge amount of internet time. I have used various programs from photo collage software to social media and everything in between, what I didn’t realise was how much of a drain all of these can have on my laptop. I have of course noticed how much slower my computer has become over the years, I used to think it was down to the high volume of photographs and music stored on it so Hubby bought me an external hard drive. After transferring everything onto the hard-drive I was disappointed to find that the computer was only marginally faster and resigned myself to the fact that my laptop was on it’s last legs – time to start saving for a new one!

Then last week an email landed in my inbox asking if I would like to review TuneUp, a PC cleaning software which removes clutter, freeing up memory and increasing performance on a laptop, tablet or PC. TuneUp RRP is £29.99, available from Amazon or TuneUp.com.

I ran TuneUp on my laptop last night and initially was unimpressed, it seemed to be taking forever. The literature for TuneUp says it should take less than 25 minutes so after a couple of hours I felt despondent. What I hadn’t realised was that I had my power settings on my laptop set to hibernate when the keyboard hadn’t been touched for more than 15 minutes and so it had gone into hibernation before TuneUp had an opportunity to finish. This morning I changed my power settings and restarted TuneUp. Sure enough within 20 minutes the program had completed it’s work. I was shocked to read the error report which I have displayed below, just look at all those problems!!!

I followed the onscreen instructions and set the software to carry out the maintenance. What I liked about TuneUp was that it explained fully what it was doing before I dared to press the button to confirm the action. It gave me the confidence I needed to proceed and not be worried that I was deleting something important. Aside from deleting unwanted data, it also asked me if I wanted to disable some programs which were running in the background. I didn’t realise that although a window wasn’t open for the program and the program wasn’t in use, it could still be running and making the system run slower. For instance, I have a number of different digital cameras all with their own individual software programs. I might not use the same camera each time and so wouldn’t call upon it’s software from one month to the next but the software would be permanently enabled ‘waiting’ for me to use it. I have now set this software to only start up when I actually request it. There were 127 different software programs on my laptop which were permanently enabled. I have now cherry picked the ones I want to be permanently enabled and reduced this number to just 14!!!

Once the software had completed I restarted the laptop (which loaded in half the time) I decided to run TuneUp again, this time it only showed 24 problems in the ‘clean registry’ section and took less than a minute to run. My laptop feels as good as new now and the really great thing is that TuneUp will continue to keep my laptop clean, running the maintenance on it every 3 days of usage time when the computer is in idle mode. My only fear is that my laptop will now work faster than I can!

Top 5 reasons to  Spring Clean your computer:

1. Security: All versions of Windows store temporary files and logs. These sometimes contain sensitive information, including passwords. A regular clean up of these files is essential in order to protect your privacy.
2. Reliability: We’ve all experienced the blue screen of death. Often, these crashes can be attributed to having too much junk on our computers. Removing this junk can’t guarantee your computer won’t crash, but it certainly will help.
3. Better web browsing: Endless hours spent surfing the web leads to large caches of old cookies and unnecessary clutter. Removing these can improve your web speed significantly.
4. Disk space: Many of today’s tablets and laptops come with very limited disk space, as the cloud becomes a more convenient method of storage. When your disk space is so limited, even a small amount of junk files can seriously hamper the speed of your computer. TuneUp can help to organise what is needed and what isn’t, freeing up more space for you.
5. Performance: Not only does TuneUp remove unwanted files that are clogging up your system, it also allows you to get rid of old apps and games that you haven’t used in ages, giving your computer an extra boost in performance.

GIVEAWAY TIME!!!!

If you think that your computer could do with a bit of a spring clean I have one copy of TuneUp to give to a lucky Mummy Matters reader. Just follow the instructions below:

Mandatory Entry

• Google+ this post using the widget at the bottom of the post (let me know that you did so in a comment below with your Google+ name/id)

Additional Options

• ‘Pin It’ – using the widget at the bottom of the post and then let me know that you did so in a comment below with your Pinterest name/id.
• Tweet about this competition including @MummyMatters and the URL of this competition – tell me you did so in a comment below with your Twitter ID.
• ‘Like’ Mummy Matters on Facebook and tell me that you did so in a comment below with your Name/ID.

Giveaway Closes 11.59pm on 30th April 2013!!!!!

Terms and Conditions

1. All entrants must be over 18 years of age
2. Entries are open to UK residents only unless otherwise stated.
3. Prizes can only be sent to a valid UK address unless otherwise stated.
4. Only entries received by the closing date will be submitted to the competition.
5. Winners will be chosen at random from all valid entries within 14days of the closing date.
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