By Ned Jordan
There's no shortage of registry repair and system boosting utilities out
there. Do a Google search for them and you'll find that there's a bewildering
array of them out there, or simply surf the internet and you're bound to see a
banner ad sooner rather offering to do a free scan of your system. While it's
true that a corrupted registry can affect your system's performance, slow
performance is usually due to a combination of factors and even if you can
manage to cut through all of that noise and find something that does a good job
of repairing your registry you might not notice that much a change in your
performance. I know this from experience, having tried a number of the in an
effort to maintain a whole menagerie of computers here at The Gamers' Temple
offices, and slow computers around here mean slow games, and we really don't
like slow games.
Since I haven't yet found any utility that I'm really happy with, I decided
to give
iolo
System's System Mechanic a try and put it through its paces. There were
several things about it that interested me, but the top two were probably that
it takes a whole computer approach to analyzing performance and that it has some
very economical licensing terms. System Mechanic includes the requisite registry
analysis and repair utility, but it has an extensive array of tools beyond that.
A number of these are performance related, such as those that look for redundant
and unused programs that are taking up system resources, or preventative such as
hard drive analyzers that look for potential problems before they become issues.
While these tools can all be run individually, the nice thing about System
Mechanic is that you can tell it to run a subset of these tools all at once in
either a quick scan or deep scan mode.
As for the licensing, a single purchase price comes with three years of
program updates for all of the computers in your household (note: business use
licensing is different). You can purchase a single license for that computer
that's been giving you trouble and then install it on another computer to keep
it running smoothly.
I installed and ran System Mechanic on a number of different systems,
including XP, Vista, and Windows 7 machines. Two of these machines, one XP and
the other Vista, were giving me troubles. The XP machine was taking five minutes
or longer to boot and the Vista machine had picked up a couple of quirks that
included sometimes not displaying dialog controls properly and sometimes taking
a long time to shut down. I also have a Vista laptop that would lock up at
random times, and gave System Mechanic a crack at it, too. I also put it on
another two machines that were working fine, one XP and the other Windows 7,
both to see if there were potential issues that hadn't quite manifested
themselves yet and as control machines to see how many errors there were on
"good" machines compared to "bad".
When first run on a machine, System Mechanic immediately performs a scan of
the system and provides you with speedometer gauges that give you a quick look
at the state of your system. It also reports the total number of issues and
gives you the option of fixing them all with a single button click or viewing a
list of the problems discovered. I like that users who simply want things fixed
or don't know enough about computers to understand the errors can simply have
them repaired and then move on, while those who are more computer literate, or
want to become more so, can look at each individual issue and see an explanation
of why it's a problem. From there you can select what to repair or not on a line
item basis if you'd like. Once the repairs are completed you have the option of
doing a deeper scan and running a larger set of the utilities. The deep scan
takes longer to run, but its more thorough nature can turn up additional issues
under the hood.
On the machines that were running pretty well, System Mechanic found a few
dozen errors, quickly fixed them up, and proclaimed the PCs' statuses to be
good. On the problem PCs, the errors detected numbered in the thousands. The XP
machine that was taking so long to boot required several cycles of deep scans
followed by reboots before the number of issues began to whittle down to a
manageable number. The two Vista machines improved significantly. The issues
that those machines were having cleared up and they became their old selves
again. The problem XP machine needed more work, and it took several cycles of
repair and reboot before improvements became more apparent. The startup time
improved significantly on that machine, although at the time of this writing
it's not back to its old self. I may need to take more drastic measures to make
it run like new again.
Once you fix any issues with your PC, you can run System Mechanic to monitor
its health and eliminate issues as they come up. On Vista and 7 you can run a
desktop gadget that shows you the current state of your system and lets you know
when some repair work should be done. On all systems you can specify a set of
tasks for it to run automatically in the background for you. In keeping with the
speedy PC philosophy, the only task enabled by default is the program update
downloader, but you can have it monitor your hard disks, registry, and system
security in the background.
There plenty of other tools available in System Mechanic that you can run to
take your computer past just being healthy and into the realm of being optimized
for better performances. You can run these tools in batches by category such as
repair diagnostics, or on a tool by tool basis. There are over 30 tools in all,
so System Mechanic is a complete package for PC maintenance. These tools are
grouped by function, and fall into the following categories: performance,
protection, clean-up, repair, privacy, system configuration, and system
diagnostics. It's difficult to find a tool that does this much, let alone does
it so well.
System Mechanic is highly recommended. It has enough "one button" operations
that a user who doesn't know a lot about PCs can benefit greatly from using it,
and there are a treasure trove of monitors and utilities for a power user to
make use of. If you've got a PC that's giving you troubles (or one that you
don't want to start doing so), you should definitely install it and let it go to
work.
Final Rating:
