System Cleaner is developed by Pointstone Software, which has been creating other types of system utility software since 1996. It is a suite of optimization tools designed to improve your PC’s performance and maintain PC health. While our tests show that the overall improvement it makes to computer performance is minimal, the boost it gave to our PC’s bootup speed was impressive. In addition, it’s one of the few PC cleaner apps we reviewed with a perfect diagnostic consistency score.
To evaluate each PC system utility app, we tested how well each one improved our test PC, which we set up to be frustratingly slow. We used PCMark 8 to benchmark the test PC’s performance both before and after optimization.
After all our tests, System Cleaner improved our PC’s performance by an average of 4.78 percent, which was about average for the programs we reviewed. That said, average doesn’t really mean anything here because even the best software, Glary Utilities Pro, only improved our computer’s performance by 12.62 percent, which isn’t enough to be noticeable. In other words, don’t expect a major boost to your PC’s speed, even from the best apps. At best, they are good for basic maintenance.
The most impressive improvement was to bootup speed, which increased by 52.27 percent. This was the best improvement result in our tests and high enough to actually be noticeable. It’s also significant because we were only able to improve the bootup speed by 42 percent using the Windows startup manager. For comparison, the worst app that we reviewed, WinZip System Utilities Suite, slowed our boot up speed by over 124 percent.
System Cleaner promises to find unnecessary files and recover storage, but after installing the software and running its optimization tools, we actually lost 450MB. Of course, that isn’t a lot of space, but the fact that we lost storage is disappointing.
System Cleaner is one of the only PC system utility software suites we gave an A+ diagnostic consistency score to. This means you can trust its diagnostic results. We scanned the computer for errors, fixed the errors and then ran another scan. In the additional scans, it never found other errors.
Ease of use is perhaps System Cleaner’s biggest downside – it received a D in our evaluation. Most intermediate users can likely navigate the interface, but it would be very difficult for a novice to use. However, its installation process received an A+ for ease of use, which means even novices won’t find it difficult to install.
Summary
Pointstone’s System Cleaner is good for basic maintenance, but you shouldn’t expect major improvements to your computer’s performance, except for the bootup speed. With a 4.78-percent overall improvement, it simply doesn’t provide noticeable results. However, it was the only PC cleaner app in our review with perfect diagnostic consistency, which means you can trust it to diagnose and fix what it says it can.
