Uniblue Powersuite Pro 2013 Review

When I decided to take Uniblue’s Powersuite for a spin, it was due more to a curiosity than anything else. While I don’t feel like my PC needs to be optimized (it is a six-core with 12GB of RAM, after all), I wanted to see how well the application worked, see if it could be a replacement for some other tools I use, and see if it hosed my OS.

If you’re a “novice” computer user or you want an optimizer that’s just plain simple to use and works well without breaking your system, Powersuite might be worth a consideration. However, we can’t overlook a couple of points.

First is the price. At $60, this is rather expensive software, and aside from the speed tools it bundles in (such as CPU Manager), it doesn’t fill a void as free solutions exist that tackle the same things. I mentioned CCleaner earlier, and it’s a good example. It offers a far better junk file cleaner and can also clean your registry (but not defrag). To Uniblue’s benefit, its registry tool found many more results than CCleaner – about 2:1.

But then there are issues like the defragger tool which can’t be set on a schedule and is ignorant of SSDs, willing to defrag them without a second thought. If you want to dig even deeper, many of the tweaks the program offers are fluff, things that just aren’t going to make a real-world performance difference. This is true of all PC optimizers, however.

This all said, we can’t recommend the program unless you realize its caveats and yearn for the goal of ultimate simplicity. While it’s nice to have an all-in-one package, a free defragmentation tool and CCleaner handle the bulk of what Powersuite does, so $60 is a very hard sell.

The biggest upside is that during all of my testing, taking advantage of every feature the program offered, I didn’t experience a single issue. Not a crash, not a slight hang – nothing. That in itself is impressive.

Pros

• Simple to use.
• Attractive, easy-to-use interface.
• Registry tool yields more results than other tools we tested.
• Taking advantage of everything the software had to offer, we never experienced a single issue.

Cons

• Unable to schedule defrags (and have it ignore SSDs).
• The file compress tool compresses files that don’t need to be.
• Cleaning of junk files is limited, as it targets very few sources.
• Expensive for what it offers ($60 USD).

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