If you ask any computer user if they'd be averse to ‘speeding up their PC' you'd be unlikely to find anyone who says no. Upgrading and overclocking aside, the only real way to do this is to optimise software, which usually turns out to be ultimately unfulfilling if you don't know what you're doing.

Unless, of course, you pick up a suite that does it all for you. Uniblue's SpeedUpMyPC 3 is the latest version of this ‘what it says on the tin' software, and as the industry has taken quite kindly to it in the past we're keen to see what's new.

In reality, aside from a few updates to the optimisation engines, the main upgrades come in the form of additional tools, notably a disk cleaner, disk defrag and file shredder. These fairly common albeit useful programs are merely the icing on the rest of the cake, though, which comprises a range of optimisation routines for your memory, CPU, hard drive, Internet connection and operating system.

When the software fires up you'll need to run an initial scan to determine your optimisation level; on our system we weren't surprised to find this was quite poor. You can then choose to optimise any or all of the main areas, which takes a few minutes depending on how messy your system is. Your current optimisation level is shown on the main page with a handy speedometer-style graph, and you can view the time and date of any recent activity.

The majority of the functions of this software are automated, but you do get some degree of manual control when you work your way through the menus for the various components of your system. You can forcibly free up RAM and perform a deep recovery if you notice your memory getting overloaded, and you'll find an application booster for the CPU that allows you to prioritise certain software. Aside from this there's not a lot of additional control over the optimisation process itself, and not a lot of information, either in the form of a results window or progress logs, on exactly what the software is doing.

Aside from these tools you'll also find some more conventional inclusions such as a startup optimiser, disk cleaner, file shredder and uninstall manager. You'll find most of these tools available in Windows anyway, so they don't sell the package by themselves, but in forming part of a comprehensive suite they're certainly welcome.

After running the software for a few days we can't honestly say we experienced any massive increases in speed, but in the field of optimisation you rarely do. What we can say is that we didn't notice any ill effects, and things did generally appear to be running a tad more smoothly than usual. We did find the software very easy to use, making it great for beginners, but this level of automation also contributed towards the few negative issues we have.

As mentioned above, you're not given a lot of information on what's going on, and not really enough control over the fine tuning of processes yourself should you so desire. The help files can tell you what each tool is doing to your system, but integrating this more effectively into the optimisation process would have been nice.

Overall we were happy with the relatively small footprint, nicely automated cleanup and optimise routines and all-round performance from SpeedUpMyPC. More advanced users might bemoan the lack of manual control but for most, particularly beginners, there is enough here to suit. Whether you'll notice a significant difference in the performance of your own PC is questionable, though.