Magix PC Check & Tuning Free

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 20, 2011

As freeware system cleaners go, Magix PC Check & Tuning Free offers a good balance. Some such tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible and give you few options and not enough information about what they're doing to your system. Others overwhelm beginners with options and detailed scan reports, and they often make it too easy to delete the wrong things. The freeware version of PC Check is designed to be easy to use yet useful to people with widely varying skills, yet it also lets you perform cleaning and tune-up operations separately as well as set up easy one-click cleanups tailored to your system. While Magix PC Check & Tuning Free is freeware, free registration entitles users to extras like online storage space.

PC Check's unique interface is based on the widely familiar concept of red and green lights: Red icons indicate problems, and green icons denote cleaned and optimized features. Two huge buttons handle day-to-day operations: Check PC and Fix All Problems. We reviewed the list of scans and operations to be performed, including activating PC Check Live, a system maintenance feature. We started a scan, and a pop-up tracked each feature, displaying the items scanned and any issues found. We could click on any result for more detailed information, including selecting and deselecting items for removal. We ran each operation one by one, to make sure we knew what was going on, but PC Check completed each step quickly and without a hitch; it even optimized our system' s swap file and checked for updated drivers. The program also offers plenty of warnings to close other programs, and it gave us the option of creating a system restore point before running operations that could make drastic changes, such as cleaning the registry. We highly recommend you never skip this step unless you're absolutely sure about why you're doing it.

PC Check cleaned and optimized our system without causing any trouble, which seems like it shouldn't be a big deal, yet it is. After we'd seen what its tools do, we ran the fix-all scans with little trepidation. As always when using tools that clean and tweak your system, we recommend using all appropriate care with PC Check and Tuning Free.

Publisher's Description

From Magix:

MAGIX PC Check & Tuning Free is the easiest solution for optimizing and accelerating your PC. Speed and stability - the heart's desire of every user. Now MAGIX PC Check & Tuning is the genie granting that wish. Computers, like all devices tend to slow down after extended use, even the ones with the best hardware need maintenance. PC Check & Tuning free will return your home computer back to its original operation speed, just like it was when you took it out of the box. The program uses a variety of professionally engineered tools that were the secret weapon of our developers for years. Now they are in the user's hands. PC Check & Tuning automatically updates out-of-date drivers, completely eradicates all traces of selected private data, and comes with better cleaning tools for the removal of browser cached and temporary files. All of this with 24/7 system monitoring that warns the user of any potential problems.

What's new in this version: Version 2011 includes improved GUI design, Software Update feature, automatic hard disk cleaning, and individual changes to system startup can be made after automatic analysis has determined possible improvements (manual deactivation/activation, including evaluation of each entry).