Developer Pointstone Software has been creating system utility software since 1996. Its System Cleaner is a suite of optimization tools designed to improve your PC’s performance and maintain its health. While our tests only revealed minimal overall improvement after running System Cleaner, the software gave our PC’s boot speed an impressive, noticeable boost. In addition, System Cleaner was one of only two PC cleaner applications to achieve a perfect diagnostic consistency score in our tests. The other was Fix-It Utilities Pro.
To evaluate each PC system utility application, we tested how well it improved our test computer, which we set up to be frustratingly slow. We used PCMark 10 to benchmark the test PC’s performance both before and after optimization.
After all our tests, System Cleaner improved our PC’s performance by an average of 4.78 percent, which was about average for the programs we reviewed. Average doesn’t really mean anything here, however, because even the best software, Glary Utilities Pro, improved our computer’s performance by only 12.62 percent, which wasn’t enough to be noticeable. In other words, don’t expect a major boost to your PC’s speed, even from the best applications. At best, they are good for basic maintenance.
The most impressive improvement we saw from the application was to the boot speed, which increased by 52.27 percent. That was the best improvement result in our tests and was high enough to be noticeable. It’s even more significant because we were able to improve the boot speed for our machine by only 42 percent using the Windows startup manager. For comparison, one of the worst applications we reviewed, WinZip System Utilities Suite, slowed our boot speed by more than 124 percent.
System Cleaner promises to find unnecessary file and recovery storage, but after installing the software and running its optimization tools, we lost 450 MB. While that isn’t much of a loss, any loss at all is the opposite of the desired result.
The PC system utility application received an A– in our evaluation for ease of use. Intermediate users and most novice users should find it easy enough to use. Even its installation process received an A for ease of implementation.
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