ICT magazine

PowerUp 3 makes life simpler for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista users with a a single control center for all your Windows settings, explaining everything in simple language. It adds more protection against incorrect settings, more control, more configuration options and makes the whole process super easy. And it comes with a beautiful new graphical design for Windows Vista! PowerUp 3 comes with a package of professionally tuned profiles for a variety of purposes. Just select the profile and PowerUp automatically configures your entire system in seconds for office work, games, video and photo editing or just maximum all-round performance.

Version 3.10 enhanced profile management.

Editor’s review of Ashampoo PowerUp

Under the Windows hood

Along with necessary support for Windows Vista, Version 3 of Ashampoo PowerUp sports a new look and adds useful features such as automatic backups for restoring previous configurations and a Risk Level Monitor that displays the potential dangers of certain tweaks. It’s not perfect, but a well-designed interface that logically organizes PC settings, strong performance, and a very extensive list of customization options help earn the product a top rating.

The Windows tweaks available in Ashampoo PowerUp are too numerous to list, but if you’ve ever wanted to customize the number of rows in your Alt+Tab panel, turn off autostart for disc drives and portable devices, remove your username from the Start menu, or disable sending error reports in Office 2007, you’re covered. The interface is divided into six main sections: Home, for system overview, backups, and preferences; Optimize, for fine-tuning your system, drives, network, and software programs; Clean Up, for cleaning your Registry and securely deleting files; Customize, for a wide range of tweaks for your desktop, Windows Explorer, icons, and more; Manage, for handling your AutoStart options, Windows Services, and running processes; and Information, which includes details about your PC configuration.

Under the Home -> Assistant tab, there is a helpful new Profiles option that lets you set your PC for Performance, Security, or a balance of the two. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any way to save our own customized profiles, which would be very useful for computers with more than one user. The new backup feature is logical and worked great. The new benchmarking features are interesting for comparing your PC setup with other configurations, but the final score would benefit with a bit more explanation.

We occasionally saw German dialog boxes (”Ja” or “Nein”) when making tweaks with PowerUp 3, but there were no major stability problems, and resource usage was respectable. The trial alone offers full functionality for 10 days; registering for a free Ashampoo account adds an extra 30 days. That’s a minor annoyance when compared with the generous 40-day evaluation period. We still highly recommend Ashampoo PowerUp for Windows users.

User reviews of Ashampoo

• License:Free to try; $49.99 to buy (Buy it now)
• Editor’s Rating:
• Average User Rating: (out of 122 votes) Rate it!
• Downloads: 787,880
• Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Limitations: 40-day trial
• Date Added:January 29, 2008

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