Your PC needs constant maintenance to keep it running in perfect condition. While you can do a lot of the work manually, Iolo's System Mechanic 6 is designed to take away the effort. It's a no-nonsense approach to PC maintenance, largely leaving aside integrated security features to concentrate on a comprehensive set of tools that analyse and solve problems.
The program collates system information on its Home page. At first glance this appears cluttered, but it supplies a lot of information, and manages not to bamboozle you. Instead, it delivers verdicts on aspects of your PC's health in the form of red, amber and green indicator lights. The areas grouped into each category can be a little arbitrary and slightly confusing. For instance, Speed includes memory optimisation, startup problems and so on, while Safety looks at your anti-virus protection and highlights any security flaws. Fitness, meanwhile, covers Registry fragmentation, which could equally have been included in Speed, as well as spyware, which is something we'd have expected in the Safety group. To round things off, a couple of speed dials at the top of the screen summarise Overall Health and Overall Security. We thought our PC was in a reasonable state of repair, but System Mechanic placed both dials dangerously low.
Once an initial scan has been carried out, putting things right is a simple matter of clicking each of the category headings. You're presented with a choice of quick or comprehensive fixes for any problems highlighted, and before performing any action, there's the option (sensibly enabled by default) of saving the information necessary to undo it. Sadly, the program doesn't really tell you enough about what it's doing when it clears out clutter or deletes Registry entries. For instance, it will display a list of dangerous or unnecessary program entries in the Registry, but it won't tell you what they are before asking if you want to remove them.
If you want to get more involved with the fine-tuning of your PC, System Mechanic has some advanced tools, including the excellent Startup Manager. This tool provides detailed information on programs and Windows services that are enabled on startup. Details can even be filtered by individual users. In the Cleanup section, there's a dedicated tool for analysing files to help you remove duplicates, rather than just the usual tools for emptying your browser cache and deleting temporary files (something that Windows can do on its own). The Spython anti-spyware tool - a rare departure from System Mechanic's maintenance-only ethos - is also excellent although, again, it doesn't tell you much about what it's deleting.
Rather than wandering into the realms of security software, System Mechanic sensibly restricts itself to tackling PC maintenance. Its tools are comprehensive, though oddly organised, and it doesn't fall into the trap of duplicating Windows functions. Only its rather high price, and a curious penchant for keeping you in the dark, keep it from getting the full five stars.
PC MAINTENANCE SOFTWARE Requires Windows 98 or above, 64MB RAM, 25MB disk spaceAuthor: James Nixon
Iolo System Mechanic 6