The laptop was a little faster to start up, but not faster to use.įrankly, this makes NU14 a disappointing buy for £40. Expecting to see a substantial improvement, I ran Performance Test again and got a score of 174. The score of 165 was pretty awful, so I ran all the optimisation features of NU14: clean and defragment the registry, remove unnecessary startup programs and change the status of Windows services, or applications that run in the background.ĭoing that and defragmenting the drive on the laptop was painfully slow, taking several hours. To get an idea of how the laptop performed, I ran the Performance Test by PassMark in NU14. Documentation for NU14 is contained in a PDF file on the installation CD that and the online help could be a great deal more comprehensive.

And where are all the low-level tools for poking around Windows? The Clean Your Disks tool overwrites empty disk space, to prevent recovery of deleted files, and removes temporary files left by applications, but that's it. Others appear to have been purchased and bundled into NU14 by Symantec, instead of being developed by it. Once it's up and running, you're presented with a menu screen to access the different applications used to optimise and monitor the PC.Īt first glance, there are lots of tools, but you soon discover that most are shortcuts to built-on Windows ones, like the file system defragmenter. In fact, the laptop behaved like a tranquilised sloth and the kids complained that they couldn't even do their homework on it. Its 2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor should have more life left in it, but a meagre 256MB of system memory means the XP operating system hasn't got much room to stretch its legs. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.I had the perfect computer to test NU14 on: the kids' Sony Vaio laptop, with about four years of rough usage on the clock. The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. Microsoft and the Window logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. Alexa and all related logos are trademarks of, Inc. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. Android, Google Chrome, Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, LLC. Firefox is a trademark of Mozilla Foundation. or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. NortonLifeLock, the NortonLifeLock Logo, the Checkmark Logo, Norton, LifeLock, and the LockMan Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NortonLifeLock Inc. LifeLock identity theft protection is not available in all countries.Ĭopyright © 2022 NortonLifeLock Inc. The Norton and LifeLock Brands are part of NortonLifeLock Inc.

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