14 DAY TRIAL // Running maintenance tasks on an old computer is the general alternative for upgrading it with new parts. Most users see this as a good way to prolong the life of the system and postpone shelling out serious money. Bringing the old timer back to its former glory and performance is a matter of picking the right mix of tools, and these can be found both as freeware, as well as paid products you can test for a certain period of time.
Uniblue PowerSuite 2010 is neither free nor can it be tested before you buy it because it’s offered as commercialware by the developer. But each of the tools included in the suite are available individually and can be tested as these are none other than Uniblue products RegistryBooster, DriverScanner and SpeedUpMyPC. Bought individually, these instruments would cost you $74.85, but huddled under PowerSuite 2010, they come for the total of $59.95.
Installation completes without any special events. All you need is the license number and the application will be on your system in no time. No third party will bother you during the procedure, so nothing but Uniblue PowerSuite 2010 will be installed.
As soon as all is in place and you have access to the interface, the application will start assessing your system for performance issues. The three components will take turns when scanning, which makes the whole task a bit time consuming. Simultaneous scanning would have probably cut the wait, but it would have also hogged down more system resources.
The program's interface shows all three performance-boosting instruments, each of them presenting the results of their scan: amount of registry errors detected on the system, total number of issues slowing the PC down and the outdated drivers. Additionally, you are given versions for all three of them.
Overall statistics are indicative of the good job the suite has done on your computer, meaning that it holds information about the issues fixed, registry errors cleaned and number of drivers updated. To make it easy for you, PowerSuite can alert you whenever there is a new version so that you can update it.
System scanning for various issues that may hinder it releasing its true power can be scheduled for each of the three applications included in the suite, individually. Default schedules are set weekly for registry errors, once every two weeks for SpeedUpPC and once a month, it will check for outdated drivers.
The third tab in the interface of the suite lets you customize its settings. Because it actually includes three different programs each coming with its own set of options, PowerSuite does not provide too many choices. Save for customizing close and minimize buttons, changing the language or applying proxy settings, there is nothing you can modify in this area.
RegistryBooster
Cleaning the registry of errors is an important step in boosting up the performance of the system and PowerSuite brings the right tool to the table. RegistryBooster features a nice-looking interface and a very original system of showing the current state of the registry through its own system barometer by displaying meteorological icons depicting clouds and rain, a cloudy or a sunny state.
Scanning for errors is split into three categories: system related errors, user related errors and third-party related errors. There is no possibility to select which areas of the registry should be checked against invalid entries, making it a perfect solution for beginner users.
After the scan is complete, it will display the “damage level” for each category and the number of invalids detected. Also, you can see exactly what registry category the error was detected, but there is no way for you to exonerate it from being fixed by the program. Power users can access the detailed view log, which presents both the error type and its registry path.
RegistryBooster managed to detect plenty of invalid entries at the beginning of our tests, but it could not eliminate them all and give us a system barometer dominated by a shining sun from the first runs. It needed more than three runs to bring the system to perfect registry. Of course, this was part of RegistryBooster’s statistics, because other cleaners had a different opinion: CCleaner still recorded 27 issues, while EasyCleaner detected three of them.
This sort of behavior is not at all uncommon among registry cleaners, as each of them is generally designed to target specific areas and they are endowed with different scan engines that can detect more serious issues, leaving minor problems aside. In the case of RegistryBooster, the application does spot important invalid entries that contribute to overall system performance degradation. It cannot find all the issues but it definitely improves the state of the registry after all the fixing is complete.
RegistryBooster takes all precautions in order to ensure the safety of the system even if something goes wrong. In this sense, the application keeps logs of the registry repairs it performed and creates backups of the configuration before any alteration is operated. This way, you can restore the registry to the state prior to the cleaning session. All you have to know before doing this is that a reboot is in order for the restoration to complete (you can delay the restart of the system to a convenient time).
The application comes with complete registry services providing defragmentation options. Once started, the operation cannot be stopped and ends with a system reboot so that the elimination of gaps between the data takes effect. As far as the performance boost applied to the system goes, our tests showed that more than one run is necessary if you want no empty spots scattered among registry data.
Our registry started with a 6% fragmentation and after running RegistryBooster, this decreased to 3%. On the downside, insisting on the job did not improve the numbers at all, fragmentation level and gaps continuing to be present.
The level of details and granular control available in RegistryBooster recommend it to average and beginner users that want to optimize Windows Registry. It effectively eliminates most of the invalid entries but, just like all other cleaners on the market, it will skip some of them. The application has been suited with defragmenting functionality to compact the registry and improve read/write speeds. Registry backups are created automatically before any modification occurs and they are preserved for as long as the user wishes.
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This article is also available in Spanish: Restaura tu sistema en la gloria de su pasado (I)
