step one was to create the kind of bloated bogged down system that would
send someone looking for a remedy so we downloaded every piece of free software
in Arms Reach carpet bombed our system drive with random extracted zip folders
and sprinkled in a generous helping of RGB control applications which might not
sound that bad but it took our system from booting up in 28 seconds to booting
up in over a minute and guys that's on a
high performance gaming PC step two was
to do what the average person would do and Google best PC speed up tools where
almost immediately we noticed a pattern most of the review sites for these tools
recommended the same handful of tools over and over and over again which might
seem like a case of hey experts agree
until you dig just a little bit deeper
what is this for every tool on their recommended list includes Windows 10
offers comparable built-in tuneup tools
I mean kudos for honesty I guess but if Windows has these features for free then
why the Sam fool are you recommending that I buy other software to find out we
took the one Brave step that no one else seemed to be willing to take we actually
bought and installed the most recommended PC speed up tools to see if
they could fix what ails us spoiler some
of them actually work work pretty well but you can achieve a similar result for
free all it'll cost you is patiently listening to this message from our
sponsor glet meet the Flint 2 your
networking Ally it runs on vanilla openwrt has speeds of up to 900 megabit
per second and even has multi-wan support check it out at the link down
below after braving the infested listicle Wasteland that used to be
Google's search results page we decided to dig further into a shampoo win
Optimizer a vast cleanup C cleaner AVG tuneup IObit Advanced system care 17 Pro
and Microsoft PC manager if a free trial
of the premium features was available we used that otherwise we bought the
software outright and the last line You'll Find on our performance charts is
a fresh Windows install to see how close our tools can get to the outof the-box
experience now one of the most common complaints is my computer takes forever
to start up and every one of these applications includes a dedicated tool
to help address this that honestly works pretty well across the board our desktop
to desktop reboot times dropped by at least 30 seconds but there were some
standouts IObit and C cleaner led the pack cutting our time by more than half
can't say I expected that given that IObit added six of its own applications
to our startup sequence but hey you can't argue with the results which is
unfortunate for Microsoft who seem to know less about debloating their own
operating system than these third parties with that said it's not like it
was all bad news for Redmond as you would expect a clean Windows install
topped the charts which is probably going to be a bit of a pattern here now
we need to address our pet room elephants why is it that a shampoo and
AVG have a did not finish here it's more
of a DNT on a shampoo site we were
overwhelmed by just how many pieces of software they made and when we did find
win Optimizer the one that the review sites told us to use there was six
different options we could have just gone with the latest one version 27 but
we didn't even feel like we could trust that since if you refresh the page or
clear your cookies the price would change every single time it even went as
low is free if you bought it with another piece of software this Rabbit
Hole actually goes much deeper and we will we'll touch on it after some more
benchmarks But ultimately this caused us to be uncertain about what we were even
buying we just killed it from our testing as for AVG they were actually
bought by aast back in 2016 and since over the years they've become almost the
same piece of software except for AVG requires a credit card to start the free
trial no see you later we're over it and yes C cleaner is also owned by aast but
the UI and the features were different enough that we just decided to keep it
in our testing kicking off our productivity Suite then we started by
encoding a 10 1080p video in hand bre which is a really useful test because
the run-to-run variance is extremely tight allowing us to demonstrate the
small but measurable effects of both a bloated system and of these tools now
obviously these differences are pretty small but given that I expected them to
be pure snake oil I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised now as you'd expect
a fresh install of Windows is of course the best medicine but reinstalling
everything you actually do use can be a timec consuming Endeavor compared to
just running a vast which landed darn near our fresh install demonstrating
that these tools well they can't speed up your PC but they may be able to
actually unslow it or wait unless who in
cinebench 2024 C cleaner and IO bit tied
with a clean install in single core but a vast andc cleaner actually won the
multicore test well except that a 20 point difference
between all the competitors here is uh not as big as it sounds so if we're
being realistic everything but the bloated system is within our
expectations for a clean system which is
still a good result for our cleaners our last productivity test is szip which is
great because in addition to looking at our CPU it tests the impact of bloat on
our poor cluttered up SSD almost all of
these softwares have some kind of Drive optimization button that tries to clean
up temporary files clear junk files like old Windows updates and some even go as
far as to defragment or trim your drive organizing all of the files in a way
that they are more quickly accessible as for our results wow this is by far the
biggest difference we've seen yet creating a compressed zip file results
in as much as a 9% difference between our bloated system and IObit as for the
rest well regardless of whether we're compressing or de compressing files our
results ended up falling within the expected run-to-run variant so I guess
they all work the same but with that said there is a clear difference in the
experience of using the different Suites while Microsoft PC manager didn't lead
the packing results and didn't even include a trim function what it did do
was perform a lot of the other cleanup functions without feeling like bloatware
plus I mean it's free real estate so far
for the paid options a vast sea cleaner and IObit have all done pretty well at
UNS slowing our computer managing to get us on par or at least close to a fresh
install the question is can they pull off the same in gaming well I would love
to talk to you about that but first there's something way more important
that we need to address in researching this project we came across some of the
most invasive predatory marketing tactics that we have ever seen going
back to a shampoo you might at first say wow great they're Intel and Microsoft
Partners but look closely you guys that
is definitely not the official Microsoft partner logo and neither Intel nor
Microsoft list a shampoo as a partner in return this is pretty much the tech
industry equivalent of updating your relationship status except she has
absolutely no idea who you are and every pick of you together has obvious
hoverhand and a shampoo wasn't the only
one whose business practices are in bad condition
ER IObit was super aggressive when it
came to completing the sale bombarding us with promotional bundles and using
any excuse to offer us an enormous discount is it spring is it Mother's Day
Mom forget the flowers I got you IO bit
now all I got to do is complete the checkout process and oh my goodness the
fomo marketing tactics don't stop there
if you're on the checkout page and you go to close your browser a popup warns
you that OMG wait for the next 5 minutes
you can save another 20% which by the way I went for since hey it was Elijah's
job to sit at the computer and wait for the price change anyway what do I
care okay I do care these kinds of gross
tactics are everywhere I mean IObit ticks down a limited offer that resets
if you clear your cookies so obviously it wasn't that limited and then they
continue to abuse you even after you purchase the software I have three
downloads remaining what I paid for the
licensed version of your software how can you deny me the right to download it
again especially since I can just download the free version as many times
as I want and then activate it with my key now for many of you this isn't going
to be a surprise and you probably won't fall for this stuff but if these tactics
exist you know it's because they work on someone so just hey for you and yours
stay safe out there some of the more basic applications that we saw and up
just wrapping Windows features into a pretty looking interface and then taking
your money for repackaging what you already had we're going to have a fun
closer look at that over at lm. g/f Floatplane where John and Elijah talk
about some of the funny stuff they found during testing that didn't make the YouTube cut now for the gaming results
drum roll
please yeah literally the exact same the
only slight difference is IObit lost 3 FPS in both averages and 1% lows and our
clean install was only outside of our expected variance compared to our
applications in one game and even then it was just barely which it's kind of
confusing right I mean why wasn't our bloated system worse than a clean
install well for starters modern systems
usually include multiple CPU cores some of which can manage background
applications at a lower power State while the main course focus on your game
and the developers of these tools know this which is why most of them don't
mention gaming at all and even the ones that do don't focus on it but then okay
what about the outlandish claims that they do make does that mean those are
real then IO bit promised to make our system 200% faster and a vast promised
23% faster work performance how do they
get away with saying those things when that's clearly not what we measured
there are millions of potential combinations of computer hardware out
there and when you add software to the mix those combinations easily balloon
into the billions so because it's pretty
much impossible to test every one of these combinations there's just no real
way to hold these companies accountable for these claims with all of that said
is there anyone that I would recommend a software package like this for if you're
watching this video probably not you but
if you are constantly being bothered by a family member to update their drivers
delete useless startup items and clear up their storage space then I would say
a vast and sea cleaner are easy to use applications that can help with that and
maybe give them a financial incentive to learn this stuff for themselves I would
have actually included iob bid in that list since they legitimately performed
well in all of our tests but installing six applications combined with that
horrible shopping experience just disqualifies them in my book we are
still going to have all of them linked Down Below in case you want to check them out but I just man these sites some
of them aren't even worth going to especially because realistically if you
don't mind spending 5 minutes a month on computer hygiene there are some tricks
to achieve very similar results while sparing your credit card that are both
fast and easy you can even do them right now hit control shift escape to open up
task manager and head to the startup tab from there you can choose which
applications you want on Startup and which ones you're okay to open manually
if this takes you even 3 minutes and then saves you 30 seconds on every
reboot you are going to make up that time you spent in just six reboots
taking that a step further if you're noticing that there are apps in there that you haven't used in Forever hey
maybe it's time to just uninstall them search add or remove programs and then
take your time going through the list and looking for apps to remove this
won't only stop that app from starting up on boot but it should also help free
up some storage space speaking of storage if you want to deag or trim your
drive the Windows search bar is your new best friend in most of your cases these
tasks will run automatically but if not you can change that setting here or you
can press the optimize button to run them right now this can take a while
though on slower mechanical drives so just maybe let it run on the schedule or
run it the last thing before you go to bed another storage tool is disc cleanup
just scroll through the lists and confirm what you'd like to clean the
biggest ones are probably going to be your recycle bin and your temporary files then click okay and just like that
you've probably saved a couple dozen gigs if you haven't done this in a
couple years our final tip tip is if you really need more performance it may just
be time for an upgrade and guys I'm not talking about a whole new system but the
thing is many of these tools are targeting people who are on older
systems that might still be using an old school hard drive as their main system
boot drive but the issue with that is at
the price of this software you could just buy an SSD that would result in a
truly meaningful day-to-day performance Improvement and then clone all of your
data over to it with a convenient free trial tool like macrium or another
option would be this one from as shampoo just make sure to refresh the page a few
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