AVG PC TuneUp review

AVG TuneUp has a decent selection of tools, but outclassed elsewhere.

AVG Tuneup
(Image: © AVG Tuneup)

Top Ten Reviews Verdict

A slick app from a good stable, but we found AVG TuneUp much too keen to take our payment info

Pros

  • +

    Effective tools

  • +

    Automatic app updates

Cons

  • -

    There’s better elsewhere

  • -

    Demands payment for free trial

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AVG TuneUp comes from the same well-regarded stable as AVG Antivirus, and comes with an unusually long 60-day free trial as well as a subscription. Installing the free version is simple enough, but the app is just a teaser - scanning your system but not actually fixing anything until you wither subscribe or activate the free trial. It's not our top pick, but AVG TuneUp does rank among the best repair software for PC.

It’s here that an otherwise promising app gets a big mark against it. If you want to use the 60-day free trial, it still insists on you inputting your zip code, and a credit card number or PayPal account so you can pay it $0.00. This seems pointless at best, and a sinister data grab at worst. We wouldn’t be surprised if it put people off using the software altogether. Then, when you’ve activated your trial, it places a ‘thank you’ window that you can’t close in front of the main AVG TuneUp window, making it impossible to actually do anything. The best you can do is to drag it out of the way until you quit the app.

Once all that’s out of the way, however, AVG TuneUp proves itself to be a streamlined system utility with a good range of options. Its System Junk scanner found gigabytes of junk files on our hard drive - although it mixed old System Restore points in with that, which are the sort of thing you’ll hopefully never need but we tend to keep around out of an abundance of caution. 

AVG Tuneup

(Image credit: AVG)

Speed Up found a lot of start-up programs it claimed were slowing down the start-up of our test PC. This was probably true, but some were essential to the running of the computer, so we weren’t about to take its word for it and put all the apps to ‘sleep’. This part of the app duplicates something you get for free in Windows 10, although there’s a slightly more user-friendly shell on it here. We liked the bar charts that show how severe the slowdown effect is, however.

The next major tab in the app is Fix Problems, which contains links to issues the app has found with your computer. In our case we had a drive that had never been scanned for errors, and three installed apps that were in need of updating. There’s an option to turn on the automatic updating of your apps, but it’s worth noting that it didn’t seem to pick up on every app we had installed - while it assessed Opera and VLC for updates, Chrome and OpenOffice were missed. 

Over at the right-hand side of the interface, there’s a link to All Functions, which displays as a list but looks much shorter when displayed this way. There’s also a Statistics page, which shows how many gigabytes of space the app has freed up, how many start-up applications it’s put to sleep, etc, since you started using it. This is cute, but doesn’t really add anything of substance to the app.

AVG Tuneup

(Image credit: AVG)

Of more use is the Rescue Centre, from which you can safely undo changes that the app has made. This is the sort of feature that’s essential to PC tuning apps aimed at users who aren’t IT professionals, as you never know the effect that deleting apparently abandoned shortcuts or tinkering with the registry will have on your computer. Being able to undo the changes you’ve made adds a welcome layer of safety. The final tab on the right is Mobile, which is nothing but an advert for the Android version of AVG TuneUp, from which you can email yourself a link to the app’s installation page.

Should you use AVG TuneUp?

AVG TuneUp is a decent system utility that comes from a source many people will trust. Despite this, we have reservations about the installation process and its eagerness to grab your payment information even when signing up for the free trial. When compared to Ashampoo WinOptimizer and the free Glary Utilities, its range of functions looks a bit limited, and you should definitely check out one of the other best system utility packages before settling for AVG’s.

Ian has been a journalist for 20 years. He's written for magazines and websites on subjects such as video games, technology, PC hardware, popular (and unpopular) science, gardening and astronomy. In his spare time he has a pet tortoise and grows his own vegetables. He also has a passion for cameras and photography, and has written for TTR on these subjects.