

While the boot time was noticeably faster after the software ran, the best applications we reviewed, such as Glary Utilities Pro, boosted the startup speed by more than 40 percent. The biggest improvement Norton Utilities made was to our test computer’s startup speed, which increased 17.16 percent.

The Apple MacBook Air M2 is almost as good as the Pro, but it's a fraction of the price


Quietest PC 2023: Almost silent computers for your home officeīest tablets 2023: the best of iPad, Android, Samsung and moreīest home computers 2023: Find all the best desktop PCs and Macs Lightest laptop 2023: These are the best ultrabooks for ultimate portability Laptops with best battery life 2023: Get a long-lasting laptop for hours of useīest laptop with upgradeable RAM 2023: Super-power your laptop with more RAM Regardless, this application isn’t going to turn your slow computer into a fast, powerful machine. In fact, in previous years, the results were flipped for this program, with a 6 percent boost for word and data processing and a 3 percent decrease for graphics processing. Such trade-offs are common with system repair software gains made in one area can come at the expense of another. Norton Utilities improved graphics-processing performance by 6.15 percent, but word- and data-processing performance slowed by 2.73 percent after optimization. The overall improvement to our test PC’s performance was merely 3.84 percent, which was a little below our category average and well below the best-performing applications in our comparison, Glary Utilities Pro and WinOptimizer. Finally, we evaluated how easy the interface was to use. We ran consistency tests to gauge each product’s trustworthiness, as it’s not uncommon for PC system utility software to bloat scan results, claiming to find errors that have already been fixed. In addition, we timed increases in boot speed using BootRacer. We tested how much each PC cleaner’s optimization tools improved computer performance by using PCMark 10 to benchmark word and data processing, graphics processing, web-browsing speed and video chat quality.
