UNIBLUE ?

What about their products ?
Good reputation ? Safe ? Effective ?

Thanks.

 

I have used a few of their products and have not found them to be great. One of them, an anti-malware program (at least I think it was an anti-malware program but it might have been something else, it was a number of years back), which I had purchased, was discontinued within a year of purchase. No no new versions, no definition updates etc. Contacted the co and was basically told "Too Bad".

Draw your own conclusion from the above.

 

Well, I just got too intrigued, so I bought Uniblue's "Power Suite 2009".

I am in the middle of checking it out. I ran the registry cleaner and registry defragger. I just accepted everything it suggested. I was able to reboot and haven't discovered any problems yet.

Of course I performed a full disk image prior to all this; created a retore point; backed up all my data files; and accepted the Uniblue "create backup of registry " option.

Reviews to follow.

UPDATE: I have gone through every optimization option, in the "Registry Scanner", Driver Scanner" and "SpeedupmyPC" and accepted all the options, except for 3 drivers it suggested that I am not sure are comparable with my HP OEM comuter.

Everything still works !

But things really don't seem any faster. My PC was already fairly fast. We'lll see what my further impressions are.

It is nice to have everything all in one program, and the interface is clearly laid out. You have options for reviewing and deselecting anything in any of the suggested "optimizations". I really like the program. It just doesn't seem to be giving a big practical benefit yet. We'll see.

 

Finally :

This program is definitely worth the $35 I paid at Newegg for a download. Even though there might be free utilities that do everything this does, this one has multifunctions all in one place and seems fast and safe.
I wouldn't contend it is better than others, but I know for sure that the Microsoft Live Onecare safety Scanner has scrambled my system in the past. I have been "optimizing" and testing my PC all day, and this one works safely.

Unfortunately, my boot/reboot speed has not changed significantly. It is still anywhere from 55 to 75 seconds. But programs seem "snappier". maybe it is a psychological boost.

I will report any other occurrences.

 

Thanks for the snapshot The GUI looks friendly and clean. I've trialled their driver scanner few months ago, but it was kinda buggy under vista 32. I hope it's working fine on your machine.

Placebo effect, my friend

 

I did discover some driver problems after the whole "optimization" thing, which including adding some new drivers. But oddly it wasn't the drivers I had updated. It seemed like changing the USB mass storage device driver caused my computer to loose track of my UPS backup battery driver; and my keyboard special function buttons no longer worked.

So, after reinstalling the keyboard driver, and a few reboots and re-plugging in some devices, everything seems to work again.

Aside from reboots NOT being faster, it seems like the computer's operation really is faster. Things are happening so snappily that it is a little unnerving. I click something and it opens or changes so fast that I wonder if it has really changed yet. So I have to double check the screen. I literally can't even see the response when I "save" documents from Word or Excel. I had to close and reopen the docs to verify that it had really saved them the first time!

 

Update:
Yesterday and last night I started noticing odd, erratic behavior and freeze-ups. After numerous attempts at tweaks, reboots, etc, I continued to have programs like Windows Explorer freeze up at very odd times.

Finally, I got frustrated and reinstalled my pre-uniblue disk image.
That was successful, so I am back to stable running.

I must have accepted one of Uniblue's recommended tweaks that I shouldn'r have. Anyway, I am going to reinstall it, but this time I will examine every suggested change a lot more carefully.

 

You should be very careful with system optimization tweaks, particulary if it involves the registry.

Problems don't always occur immediately, and if at a later date something goes wrong, you may not realize that the 'tweaks' in conjunction with something else may be responsible, and even if you knew, you probably wouldn't know how to fix it.

I really see no reason to use optimization 'tweaks' for Windows, it's unlikely that you'll gain anything from it.

In general, if the situation gets bad enough, it's probably best to reformat your harddrive and reinstall the OS plus the rest.

Or restore a good image if you'd planned ahead which I see, you did.

 

More on the Uniblue saga:
Since I started all this, I figured I would keep posting blow-by-blow updates.

Last night I reinstalled and ran all three components of the Uniblue Powersuite. THIS time, however, I carefully examined all "fixes" before accepting them.

I actually ended up accepting all the recommendations of the Registry Booster. I spent some time researching each questionable entry, and they all seemed safe, so I let them go. Note that this Registry Booster is much less aggressive than either WISE, CCLEANER, or AUSLOGICS....all of which selet things for deletion that I know would be errors.

I then defragmented the registry.

I ran, but did not accept any of the "DriverScanner" suggestions. As I had mentioned before, I had some scrambled drivers after my previous attempts here, so I just ignored all the suggestions. I DID use Rgegistry Booster to perform a complete backup of all my drivers. This seems like a pretty cool feature because it stores all my cyrrent drivers (which I know are stable) all in one location should I need to revert to them at some time. It also compresses them.

In the SpeedUpMyPC module, I deleted all the suggested "junk files", but did not accept deletion of my "privacy files". There were 316 "lnk" files, and I just didn't want to investigate them all. Most of them seemed safe, but I wanted to make sure the Reg Booster stuff remained stable before making another big change.
I also did not accept any of the "Windows Tweeks", "Network Tweaks", or "Startup Tweaks". Those will make good topics for further study before I accept any of them.
I actually did accidentally accept the "startup tweaks" and was terrified for a moment. But then I found that i can undo any of the tweaks, so i immediately undid it.

Of course I was rebooting and testing my system to the best of my ability in a short time after and between each one of these actions.

Results: Successful so far. I really think that the system drivers were the prior problem. The registry cleaning and defragging definitely does make my computer snappier. I will report any further info.

 

OK, I have been incrementally accepting more and more of the UNIBLUE suggestions in all three modules.

I am now accepting ALL recommendations of Registry Booster 2009 I have also Defragged the Registry after each incremental change.

I have DECLINED to do any of the System Tweaks, Startup Tweaks, or Network Tweaks in Speed Up My PC. But I accept all the cleaning suggestions. My research at BliackViper.com led me to manually setting numerous system services to "Manual" instead of "Automatic" though.

I run, but put on an "ignore list" the three driver updates from DriverScanner 2009.

All seems stable and fast.
Boot time under Win Vista HP SP1 is 58 seconds (4 Gig RAM), which is not any faster than usual. But once up and running all the programs are faster. hard to qualtify that though.

 

Years ago I had a dll problem on XP VLK. No other product, tried a dozen or so, would work. But a UniBlue product did. For the life of me I can't tell you the name of the product or the specific problem I had.