Standard Tuneups

Revive your device. Unimaginable speedups. Completely free.

You call it necromancy. We call it Tuesday.

Tuneups are a complete refresh for your device designed to make reliable, affordable computing accessible to everyone. By addressing the most common causes of a slow system (degraded thermals, dust accumulation, bloated software), we bring systems back to life without requiring costly upgrades.

And because access to affordable and reliable technology matters, Standard Tuneups are offered completely free of charge. No catch, no hidden fees. Just a commitment to keeping devices in people's hands and out of landfills.

If you're interested, please contact us by email, berkeley@the-it-club.org!

Heat robs away performance

...and we're here to rob it right back. As computers age, thermal paste degrades and dust accumulate. This all makes a computer run hotter, causing the processor to reduce its operating speed to prevent damage. Over time, a perfectly capable system becomes slower, hotter, and louder.

Standard Tuneups reverse that process. We fully clean the cooling system, cleanse it of accumulated filth, and replace degraded thermal paste with PTM7950, a thermal paste replacement which excellent thermal performance and is virtually immune to degradation. Better heat transfer allows in faster clockspeeds and less noise, resulting in better performance, quieter operation, and slower dust accumulation.

While we're inside, we also re-tighten screws, apply threadlocker, reinforce hinges, and do anything else needed to restore worn hardware.

Modern OS, retro bloat

Hardware restoration is only half the equation. A good software suite is the other.

Every Tuneup, Standard or Flagship, includes a clean installation of Windows 10/11 IoT Enterprise LTSC (on applicable devices, we don't do this on Macs or consoles for instance), a high-end, long-lived Windows edition built for stability, performance, and reduced overhead. Unlike consumer versions of Windows, IoT LTSC omits unnecessary consumer bloat, Copilot and other bloatware, and feature churn, resulting in a responsive, distraction-free, long-lived system.

You can install and configure this OS yourself! We have a whole guide for it, the Windows Deployment Guide.

"Old" computer? Nah.

Everything's accessible about a Standard Tuneup, including just how far back they can go. After a bit of TLC, systems as old as 2008 routinely become usable again for heavy web browsing, office work, and general multitasking.

Newer machines benefit just as much. With restored thermals and an OS that's actually suitable for human use, many computers run noticeably faster than than they did right out of the box, both in general responsiveness and in benchmarks.

This isn't a temporary patch. It's a forever* fix.

*You do need to perform periodic maintenance, such as dusting out your device and not installing bloatware, to keep your system in pristine condition. But if you need help with those, you can always come back and we'll help ya out!

Our numbers don't lie

The homepage says 330+ Tuneups? Yeah, that's not an exaggeration. Here's just one or two photos to back it up!

A few things to note:

The earliest Tuneups don't have photos. I started taking photos when I realized I'd be doing a lot of Tuneups.
Each computer has a sequential Tuneup number (e.g. #285). This is a count of the number of computers I've worked on since I came to Berkeley.
- More recent Flagship Tuneups are denoted by a plus sign (e.g. #309+)
- Some Tuneups don't have numbers written on them, though they're still part of the count..
Some photos are over-cropped, sorry! Lightroom's Auto perspective-correction feature does that sometimes.

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