Date: July 1, 2005 - Author: - Editor: Rob Williams
Are you the type of person who always wants to keep your PC in top running condition? Of course you are. Iolo promises to help, with their award winning System Mechanic 5. Does it have what it takes to pass our tests?
Caveat Emptor; Let the buyer beware. These are the thoughts that always spring into my mind every time I see a product promising to "Fix your PC". Especially when it touts optimizing your internet connection along with a slew of things that, quite frankly, I'd rather not have done to my PC such as registry cleaning and defragmenting and memory optimizing.
Imagine my pleasant surprise then to find such a piece of software that actually does what it promises and then some. I'm talking about System Mechanic 5. This is a piece of software that's aimed squarely at the average PC user, but don't let that fool you into thinking it has nothing to offer. On the contrary. It offers quite a bit for even the most grizzled power user.
Not only do you get registry cleaning that actually works very well, but you get a spyware cleaner, a memory defragger/recovery interface, startup program management, disk defragmenting with both quick and optimum settings the internet optimizer. You also get popup blocking, file cleaning, duplicate file removal, a software uninstaller that will uninstall software that has no uninstaller with it, a file mover that will allow you to even move exe's and keep your shortcuts active plus an internet track cleaner and a secure file eraser.. whew.
All this in a program you can download in less than 8MB's. Nice. There is one little thing I'd like to mention: You can purchase this software in the store and it comes in a nice box presumably with hard copy documentation, or you can purchase it online. If you purchase it online expect to receive it in a mailer sleeve with no hard copy. [Editor note: The way we received the product may differ from yours]. It does include documentation in the form of a fairly comprehensive help file but I would have been a little more pleased to see a PDF of the actual hard copy with some graphics to illustrate the operations you'll be undertaking when using the software. This isn't a major ding, it's just that less savvy users would find the help file confusing and as the old saw says "A picture is worth a thousand words" and seeing what everything does with a diagram to show the more confusing parts would greatly lower the learning curve required for some operations.
That said, there are wizards that bundle several operations into one big operation which is for ease of use. It makes it a more painless single click type of operation. I naturally, being a bit more knowledgeable, opted to go the more hardcore route and pick and choose what I wanted to do so that I could share my results here.
First off is the registry cleaner. I ran this back to back with Reg Cleaner to see how many invalid entries each turned up. Much to my surprise Reg Cleaner yielded 21 invalid entries whereas System Mechanic found 110.. 110! That's quite a few more, and after backing up my registry with the included interface, I performed the cleaning function and scrubbed those entries out of my registry. I crossed my fingers and rebooted my PC, much to my delight not only did it boot, it actually seems a bit more stable. After my initial success with the first phase I moved on to the memory defragmenter, and this is something that deserves to be seen to be appreciated.
In the first screen shot you'll notice that I have 250MB's free out of 512MB's. In the second screen shot you'll see that during the defragmenting operation, it's actually writing the ram to the hard drive in order to rearrange what's stored in memory into the most compact space possible. What you'll see in the first below screenshot is that after this takes place you gain back quite a bit of lost memory and not only that, if you'll notice where the free memory dips you'll see where I fired up paint to save the screenshot of the optimizing taking place. You'll notice that when I closed paint the ram was freed right back to the same level as it had been prior to paint being opened. Very nice indeed.
The defrag system built in is, well, passable. It offers up both quick and optimal defragging options but unfortunately both are slow. I tested the quick version on a heavily fragmented hard drive and after 2.75 hours it was at nearly the same level of fragmentation as it was when I started the run, to compare I loaded a trial version of Diskeeper and ran it where I left off with System Mechanic, within 15 minutes the disk was defragmented.
I then set a boot time session with Diskeeper which is fairly painless. I ran it to defrag the MFT and folders then re-ran it in windows since the boot time defrag seems to leave a bit of mild fragmentation behind. After that I fired up System Mechanic and compared notes, it seems System Mechanic is a little more thorough in it's defragmenting method, it still saw over 2% file fragmentation and an optimal method run knocked that out in just under an hour. This tells me that if you want the ultimate performance, run a different defragger first then run System Mechanics afterwards but if you're looking for fast defragmenting look elsewhere unless you keep the fragmentation low by running a defrag bi-weekly.
There is a rather interesting option in the defragger that is worth noting and for people that do a lot of heavily file dependent work such as video editing. There is a context menu defrag option which simply puts the option to defrag a file, folder or the entire drive into the right click context menu. I have to say that after using that method to defrag 2 gigs of pr0n files there seemed to be a significant boost in the handling of those files.
The one other option worth mentioning here is the spyware remover. It's basic, it's simple and it's comprehensive. I ran it against Microsoft's Spyware Beta which had been running on the test mule for nearly 2 months on active monitoring, and up until recently doing daily scans. Now, if you've ever used this program you'll know that there is hardly anything that you can do such as registry changes that it won't complain about, it's just that good. After firing up System Mechanic's spyware checker, aptly named Spython, I did a scan of the system and found 3 instances of adware on the system.
One was a pop under program. Spython made short work of removing them which is nice, but I'd like to see an addition made to the software to help guard against further occurrences of spyware, essentially making it nearly impossible for infected websites to inject this malware onto a persons PC. A one click inoculation would be a nice addition to this part of the software.
There are more features to the software that I haven't covered but that's simply because I haven't had a need to try them but judging on how well the rest of the suite works I'm certain that they'll work just fine. All in all what I did test seemed to be pretty bulletproof.
A quick word on the internet optimizer. It's a nearly one touch speed up for anything from broadband, to LAN to modem based internet connectivity. From my own experiences it worked out to net about a 25% increase in download speeds via my crusty 28.8 dialup connection. My average download speeds went from 2.6-2.9KB/S to a solid 3.4KB/S which in the world of dialup is pretty close to stepping out of a Yugo and sliding behind the wheel of a Mini Cooper S. Not a big difference but still a noticeable increase in speed and performance. My KoL game has never been more shpankity.
In the end, I rate System Mechanic 5 as a very user friendly piece of software that makes life a bit easier for a very attractive price point. Yes, there are a few gems that need polishing but they remain gems nonetheless. The biggest drawback I see is the lack of illustrated documentation which would be beneficial to the novice users out there but for anyone of intermediate knowledge and above the interface fairly much is self explanatory making instructions largely un-needed.
I suggest that you head over to their site and download the trial version and give it a run, I think you'll be pretty pleased with the results.
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System Mechanic 5 costs $49.99US, or $69.95 for the Professional version. Hunting around your usual PC shop or e-tailer, you are bound to save $5 - $20 depending on the version.
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