This study was designed to measure whether PC performance does worsen over time and whether PC tune-up software has an impact on such performance degradation. For each of the tested indicators of performance, researchers found significant degradations over time and found that a PC tune-up is effective in reversing this performance degradation.

This study was designed to observe various factors related to a PC's responsiveness. It quantifies changes over time by observing machines starting from a brand-new PC to one that is two years old, which has been reported as the average age that computers are discarded. The study found that PC responsiveness declined dramatically in several different areas over the course of two years: memory availability decreased by 59%, CPU idle usage increased roughly sevenfold, and the number of registry errors increased from none to 340.

This study measures whether startup time lengthens over a period of time and, if so, what factors may contribute to this impact. The study quantifies changes over time by observing machines starting from a brand-new PC to one that is two years old. Researchers found that over a two-year period, Windows startup time more than doubled, with an increase of 267%, the number of unnecessary startup tasks increased, from zero to 12, and the impact of unnecessary startup tasks sharply increased, accounting for 89% of the CPU usage.