Tune Up Your PC Swift boot times and speedy operations are among the greatest joys of unboxing and firing up a brand-new PC. After all, we want our PCs to run at peak performance, regardless of whether we have a budget laptop or a beast gaming desktop. Inevitably, however, that out-of-the-box performance fades away. Eventually, every PC slow downs, either gradually or suddenly. In those instances, you should invest in a tune-up utility. All computers eventually lose that day-one luster, becoming lethargic, unresponsive, and, at worst, unreliable. The operating system gets gunked up as apps are added and incompletely deleted, leaving behind drivers and all sorts of other system detritus. Their hard drives fill up with forgotten files we've abandoned in folders whose existence we've forgotten. Programs build up enormous caches behind the scenes that we don't even know about. Eventually, our full hard drives choke the OS as it tries to run. Outdated drivers cease to work correctly. Toolbars and other plug-ins can precipitously slow our browsers to a crawl. It doesn't matter how diligent you are, or what sort of productivity software you use to get the most out of your time if end up sitting around and waiting for your computer to catch up to you.