[Osiris]

I know and have seen a lot of users here that use these types of software. I don't use them because to me they are a waste of $$$ and didn't think they gave me any significant performance. I just happened to find this test of those software packages that claim they can increase performance. The find was yes, somewhat but not enough to spend $$ on when you can simply disable processes yourself. The only thing that sped up the performance of computers were the RAM upgrade, obviously.

So in short, don't waste your money on these programs, the same with so called "Ram Boosters". Invest with purchasing RAM and if you dont know how to upgrade RAM you can always ask someone and put your $$ to better use.

Can such a large number of people be wrong? We thought we’d take a look at some popular tune-up apps that explicitly claim they will speed up your computer or, when more carefully worded, are “designed” to speed up your computer.
We didn’t set out to see if these applications really could fix registry problems and related crashes because it's difficult to objectively measure such abilities, especially as every program claimed to be able to fix more than 1000 registry problems, most of which were simply dead links and things like having Windows updates disabled. Handy, perhaps, but not as interesting to us as the performance promises.
The five packages on test cost up to £40 and we’ve also tested a small Ram upgrade, which cost us £27, for comparison’s sake. Upgrading memory won’t appeal to everyone, since finding the right Ram for an older PC may not be simple, novices may find opening a laptop or PC daunting, and there may be Bios Ram limits to deal with too.
The test system was a five-year-old Sony laptop running Windows XP Pro 32-bit. It packs a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 512MB DDR PC2100 - the upgrade was 1GB DDR PC2700 - and a 60GB 7200rpm hard drive. It last had XP reinstalled two years ago and has been used on a weekly basis since. When first installed, XP booted up in 35 seconds but it now takes over two minutes with all the junk it’s had on it over the last two years.


PC tune-up software: does it really work? ? Register Hardware

[yzmxer608]

Though sometimes the programs used in that test did help, you can do a lot of what the programs do by yourself, for free. Plus I want to control what happens on my system, you can choose options you want or don't want on some programs like that, but you still don't have 100% control over everything like you would if you did everything manually by yourself. But, I think the article was aimed more at less experienced PC users.