Glary Utilities 5.5

Glary Utilities is a collection of tools intended to optimize your system’s performance. This software product can effectively check and fix errors and faulty configurations that are slowing your computer down. The main window works as control center for all the tools in the package. The program starts automatically with the system and monitors various aspects of computer activity, mostly boot time and memory usage. The tools are, in general, very easy to use, and there’s even a one-click maintenance, which you can schedule to run at a given frequency.

One thing that characterizes Glary Utilities is the incredibly long list of features available. These have been organized into different groups according to their functions. So, in the Cleanup and Repair group, you may find various utilities to repair registry problems, find duplicate files, manage context-menu items, uninstall applications and fix invalid shortcuts. Likewise, the Optimize and Improve group allows managing startup programs, checking and defragmenting disks, optimizing memory usage, defragmenting the registry as well as updating, restoring and backing up drivers. There’s also another group of tools, named Privacy and Security, which protect your privacy by erasing tracks of your activity. Moreover, they also let you shred and encrypt files. Additionally, you can undelete lost files and manage system processes. In the Files and Folders group, there are tools to analyze disk usage, split or rejoin large files as well as find specific items. Finally, there’s even another group, called System Tools, which takes care of collecting information about your software and hardware, backing up or restoring the registry, repairing system files, making backup copies of the whole system and restoring it from them. The application also provides some features that allow automatic system maintenance, such as erasing tracks on Windows shutdown. Besides, it is integrated with the system’s context menu for easy access.

In general, Glary Utilities focuses on various aspects of your system that may hinder its performance. For most of these tools, it’s difficult to see the real impact of its actions, mostly when your computer is already rather clean from errors. I was glad to find that this product actually allowed me to test all of its features as it’s free for private use, which means that payment is only necessary when there’s corporate use involved. I was particularly interested in knowing the effectiveness of its Registry Repair utility. As to this, the program was able to find a few errors on my system and take care of them. As the software market is full of similar tools, my advice is to explore some of them before making your final decision.