PC Optimizer

[Bruinator]

I was wondering if you guys use an optimizer on your PC and if you do does it help? What brand do you use?

 

thx

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Nope.  Haven't in years.

[dipsylalapo Supervisor]

I don't really use anything apart from Windows built in Disk Cleanup tool, but that's just for removing old Windows installations.

 

There's a bunch that @Copernicwrites about - https://www.neowin.net/news/tags/system_optimizer, should be able to recommend some too

[DConnell Member]

4 hours ago, Bruinator said:

I was wondering if you guys use an optimizer on your PC and if you do does it help? What brand do you use?

 

thx

I use Dell SupportAssist, since it's the easiest way to get Dell's driver updates and it comes with Dell PCs.

 

Other than that, there's no need. A third party solution is more likely to cause problems than optimize anything IMO.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

I use Windows' Disk Cleanup (filename: CLEANMGR.EXE) tool, which I run as administrator.  In previous versions of Windows, doing so exposed additional options for system-wide cleaning that you did not get when you ran it as a standard user.  I believe that changed in one of Windows 10's updates, but I still run it as Administrator out of habit.

 

Microsoft Windows actually does a decent job of managing itself; this is due to work that started with Windows Vista to make the operating system automatically optimized or tune itself based on the hardware's capabilities, and then to correctly repair issues.  I used to say that Windows Vista was the first version of Windows to display correct information about what was wrong with your system, and that Windows 7 was the first version to correctly fix those errors.  Windows error handling, recovery and optimization is now something that gets improvements (or, at least, can get improvements, they don't always have to roll out) in each update that comes out monthly for the operating system, just like with security and reliability updates.  So, it does improve over time, unlike how things were with "classic" versions of Windows like Windows XP, where the operating system's behavior was supposed to be immutable.

 

While performance/optimization/tuning programs get updated all the time as well, they can also do things which decrease system performance.  For example, a very popular "trick" by these programs is to delete the system prefetch cache in order to make marginal improvements in boot speed.  While this may shave a second off of boot speed, it also causes every formerly-cached program to load more slowly, and you end up losing far more performance than you gain.  Another example is clearing memory.  This forces programs running in your computer's physical RAM out of it, which increases the amount of free RAM.  But, all that does is force programs into the system's virtual memory, which is on disk.  Reading those programs from virtual memory back into physical memory is much, much slower (and disk I/O intensive) than just letting Windows manage keeping them in memory.  So... you lose actually end up losing performance elsewhere. 

 

Also, these system optimizing/cleaning/tuning programs can remove files, directories and/or registry entries that are needed by the operating system or other software on the disk.  My day job is at a security software vendor, and every so often we have customers who cannot uninstall our software or make use of certain features because the software removed the uninstall information for our software, or directories used by it because they were empty or contained 0-byte long files.  Surprise, those empty directories or 0-byte length files needed to be there for a reason.

 

Anyhow, if you really do feel the need, you can always run through the steps to optimize things manually by deleting temporary file folder directories, manually defragmenting hard disk drives, clearing your web browsers' caches, etc., but it is probably best to figure out what's actually needed and doing it yourself, instead of risking a third-party program breaking your system in some unknown way.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

 

[Gioantonnello]

I also use Disk Cleanup