It's no secret that the Windows operating system, in spite of all its qualities, is not without its foibles. And few can be more annoying than when the OS clogs up, slows downs, blue-screens and generally misbehaves. Enter stage left Axelab's XP Tuner, a tool that works solely with Windows XP Home or Professional with the hope of cleaning up the system it's installed upon.

It offers a comprehensive selection of tools, of which the headline stuff is a good place to start. The program, through a straightforward enough menu system, will scour through your PC, hunting down useless files that are clogging up space, via its File Cleaner.

As with most of the utility's features, this provides choices along the way. You can pick which drives to search, and select whether to include or exclude the likes of backup files, lost clusters and 'often unnecessary' files. Even after the clean - which on our year-old test PC saved 38MB - you're given safety choices such as only moving the files concerned to the recycle bin.

The program also offers an effective registry cleaner, a useful pop-up blocker and an anti-spyware tool to name but a few of its other tricks.

However, the fun with this one is in the details. XP Tuner plays host to over 300 functions, some of which we found very useful. It easily gets you access to details of the programs that run when Windows boots, for instance, and will allow you to edit the Uninstall Software list in the control panel, should it still contain names of programs that have long since departed.

You can play with the background of your toolbar, alter the position of your desktop picture and even play with the default programs for various tasks, and the options contained within them. Throw in further help with conserving laptop battery time, the optimising wizard and the continued willingness to guide the user through whatever they are doing and it's hard to argue with the sheer depth of choices you get for your money.

There are some downsides, though. A few of the jobs the program takes on clearly aren't up there with the leaders in their respective fields, making this a bit of a compilation album of tools. The benchmarks, for instance, while not without merit, lack the detail of something from Futuremark.

More worryingly, especially given the program's recommendations on first boot, finding updates for it is a bit of a lottery. The program's own 'Update Now' feature continually failed, and the sites mentioned within the program and on the packaging were either non-existent, not helpful or not in English.

Those grumbles aside, and factoring in the modest asking price, XP Tuner is a useful selection of tools that really cuts the mustard in its willingness to give you access to tweaks that Windows likes to keep hidden. It gave us a modest performance boost from our test PC, although we ultimately warmed to it more for the amount of control it gave us over our computer.

Clearly some areas work a little better than others, yet XP Tuner is nonetheless a comprehensive and useful utility.