I know many of you are planning your 5 am commando raids this coming Friday on the local shopping emporia, but if you need a break from trying to download all the various holiday flyers so carefully preserved in PDF format by Walmart, Best Buy et al. or trying out Black Friday apps on your iPhone, you might want to take a moment to clean up your Windows PC with the latest 2011 version of TuneUp Utilities. It will be well worth your time, and for $50 for three computers, cheap too.

All of us who use the same computer for more than a year have noticed that things tend to slow down over time: it takes longer for the PC to boot up and shut down. Even when we try to restrain ourselves from adding or deleting programs, the registry gets bogged down with superfluous entries that slow the machine down while it is running too. That is where TuneUp can help.

I have used previous versions, and while they were good about optimizing the overall Windows OS parameters, they didn’t do much in the way of figuring out the applications on my machines. The new version goes deeper into how the apps work, and makes it really easy to adjust them to meet your particular needs. You get constant feedback about the consequences of your decisions, so you immediately know whether something that you just did is going to actually improve your performance or not have any impact. I wish we had something like this for our lives.

One of the new features in the product is called Program Deactivator. If you wanted your PC to run faster, you previously had to uninstall programs that took up a lot of your system’s resources. Now, with just one click, you can deactivate a software program that you don’t normally use. However, the bits remain installed on your computer, and when you need to run the program, you just click on its icon or select it from your Programs menu and it comes right back up with almost no lag time.

By deactivating unused or infrequently used programs, you speed up your overall operations. TuneUp shows you the impact of your selection on startup, during operation and upon shut down, so you can get an idea of what kind of resource hog each program is.

TuneUp engineers did some benchmarks that showed deactivating programs returned a sluggish PC almost back to its first day performance characteristics. The process is very intuitive and takes just a few minutes.

There are a lot of other performance enhancements in the utility, including a special “turbo mode” that can make your machine run a lot faster when you need it for playing games, editing videos or doing other processor-intensive tasks.

TuneUp Utilities works for all versions of Windows since XP with SP2, including 64-bit versions. You can download a free trial here.

And if you want to see a quick video screencast that I did for the company, check it out here.