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.

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