Athlon 64 4000

Cleanup Utilities: Can They Speed Up Your PC?

But do cleanup utilities really improve system performance? Or are they the digital equivalent of a placebo (your PC only seems faster because you've invested $40 and a half hour on a utility, and you don't want to think you've wasted your money and time)? The PCWorld Labs tested such programs to settle once and for all whether they significantly speed up computers.

We dug up five well-used PCs of various specs and generations, and ran four popular Windows cleanup utilities-- Ashampoo WinOptimizer ($40 for version 7), Iolo System Mechanic ($40 for version 10), Piriform CCleaner (free), and 360Amigo System Speedup (free version)--on all of them. The result? In most cases the cleanup utilities scarcely made a difference in overall system performance, and in a few instances they actually made things slower--though they did shave a few seconds off the test machines' startup times. Read on for our in-depth findings.

Each of these utilities promises to make Windows run faster by optimizing and maintaining your system, so we decided to use our WorldBench 6 benchmarking suite to test the performance claims. Unlike artificial benchmarks, WorldBench 6 is based on timed scripted tasks in common programs such as Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Photoshop. If you were to see any performance benefits from running these cleaning utilities, they'd likely show up in WorldBench 6. (We disabled WorldBench's defragmentation routines to give each cleanup utility a chance to use its own, if it had one.)

Obviously, we couldn't use pristine PCs to test the utilities, since they wouldn't have any crud to clean. So we collected five systems of different ages that had one thing in common: wear and tear. The test PCs were a Dell Latitude D520 laptop (1.66GHz Core Duo T2300, 512MB RAM, Windows XP Professional 32-bit), a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop (1.6GHz Core Duo T2050, 1GB RAM, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit), a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge laptop (1.3GHz Core 2 Duo U7300, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional 32-bit), a Toshiba Satellite M645-S4055 laptop (2.4GHz Core i5-M450, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit), and a custom-built desktop that we frequently use in the Labs (2.4GHz Athlon 64 4000+, 3GB RAM, Windows XP Professional 32-bit). Each of these five PCs had endured months, if not years, of frequent usage without even a light dusting, much less a comprehensive system scrubbing or Windows reinstall. In short, they were exactly the kind of PCs that most people would want to run a cleanup utility on.

temperature - Athlon 64 4000+ rapidly heats to 70° after power up ...

Is it normal that my A64 4000+ AMD CPU rapidly heats up to 70+ degrees Celsius? It is visible in the BIOS config, and in a Windows tool.

I do not know the exact data it used to run, but I had problems with the mainboard/CPU combo, and the MSI guys recommended me to reseat it. That went OK I think, the relatively huge Zalman cooler above the CPU is blowing almost cold air, the system works perfectly, for as much I can test.

I did saw some tiny marks on the socket, which seemed to me like burn damage (the socket's "white", and about 4 holes for the pins do look a little brown. They didn't melt, but it worries me.

So basically: is this CPU meant to be screwed? Are those temps normal (it were a few hot days, temp of the living room gets up to 25°C-27°C) ? What can I do to fix this if it's not normal.

The CPU cooler is attached securely (it is not loose), and the cooling paste was reused when reseated (same cooler, same CPU), and I did not loose to much, only a tiny bit stayed on my fingers, and compared to the other CPU's I've seen, there was more than enough.

Don't panic . CPUs can take 70°C for a while.

Cooling paste is not meant to be reused, and what is left on cooler and CPU now has probably the opposite effect.

When you reseat a CPU (-cooler) you remove the cooling paste or pad completely. I use Isopropyl alcohol as cleaning fluid.

Then you apply a small amount of new cooling paste and reattach the cooler.

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