The Ultimate Troubleshooter for Windows PCs

No, that's not a comment, that's the name of the product. I've written several times about cleaning out the system tray by hand and otherwise juicing up your PC to run better, but The Ultimate Troubleshooter, or TUT, is a relatively painless way to take control of your what your PC is doing under the hood in one simple place.

You can download a demo of TUT for free, which gives you 10 runs of the program, plenty to determine whether it'll work for you or not. If you like it, it's $29 to buy.

The program installs easily and runs painlessly: You're immediately presented with TUT's primary screen, a list of all the tasks running on your PC currently, with helpful descriptions of what most of the apps are and who made them. This can be a huge help over the Windows Task Manager: What is NMIndexStoreSvr? It's part of Nero's CD burning software. I could look it up online, but TUT has it in its database. Even better, for known problems (like Quicktime and Adobe auto-launchers), TUT provides step by step instructions for turning these services off or lets you do it directly via its own interface.

All of this is presented in a simple table, color coded with TUT's (generally correct) impression of how much of a resource hog the various services on your computer are.

TUT also includes some tune-up services, and other system information, but most of this you can get with standard Microsoft tools like TweakUI. Still, it's nice to have in one place.

If you're uncomfortable with tools like MSCONFIG and the Services control panel, but want an easy way to speed up your PC, give TUT a try. The demo can do just about everything the retail version can do.