System Mechanic 5 professional

[Daylene]

Hi Everyone,

I recently bought System Mechanic 5 pro and decided to do a review on it to give back to neowin, since I am always asking questions here. :) Enjoy it :cool:

System Mechanic 5 Pro by Iolo software

Marks Breakdown:

Interface: 9/10

Install: 8/10

Useability: 9/10

Performance noticeability: 9/10

Overall: 9/10

Installing

When I went to install, I was prompted by a clean, nice interface. Setup was quite easy and I had the option to install the av and firewall (kaspersky home 5 (anti-virus) and Kaspersky firewall) both with a one year of updates. Install went fine and it was up and running on my system in no time, although I did not need the av and firewall, although I tried installing the av, and had a few updates problems, and numerous errors so I removed it.

Interface

When I ran the program, I was greeted by a really nice interface. It has good graphics, and pretty ismple to navigate. Soon I wass cleaning gunk out of the registry, and performing numerous tweaks in no time.

Useability

I can't complain on this, as I cleaned out all my registry junk, old shortcuts and file extensions in no time. System mechanic isn't a resource hog on my computer (128 mb of ram, 667 mhz processor) and I can even run scans in the background while I surf the net and notice no performance loss whatsoever.

Performance Noticeability

I also applied some speed boots such as the internet boost and ram defragmentation and noticed a huge performance gain. It is unbelieveable that I get get this system faster than many other people's high-end computers. Many of the tweaks are quite useful, and good documentation is provided, and it tells you what each one does. My system is exremely fast now, and I can say that this is a very helpful program, that really increases speeds.

Overall

Overall, I found the program simply amazing on my machine, and it has worked wonders, even though my system has always been maintaned and tweaked for optimum performance, this made it even faster. Only hting i didn't like was the kaspersky av that gave me a ton of problems, and forced me to reboot and remove it.

Pros:

-Comes with 1 year subscription of kaspersky anti-virus and firewall subscriptions

-Tweaks and options have noticeable performans gains for system

-great documentations and explainations of various things that it is doing

Cons:

-Kaspersky av and firewall gave me installation and updates trouble.

Good to use in conjunction with:

-SpySweeper

-Crap Cleaner

Links:

System Mechanic 5 Homepage

System Mechanic 5 pro (free trial)

Price: $49.99 cdn

[Ritalin]

How does this compare with TuneUp Utilities 2004 ?

[islanq]

Did they improve it form 4? I hated v4.0,. omg it screwed my sh!t up.

[Daylene]

Haven't tried tune-up utilities 2004, and I probably will. As for problems, I haven't gotten any yet :)

[fullermarc]

I have tried System Mechanic Pro 5.0 and had a very different experience. I actually thing Kapersky's firewall and antivirus are the strongest part of it. They work well on my system and seem straighforward and thorough. The actuall tools from Iolo are a real mixed bag. The registry tools are very strong, as well as the undelete tools. In fact they let you recover things on various media such as flash drives, as well as hard disks. The defragger is a total loss. I tried, in optimal mode to defrag a 40 GB disk that was about

1/3 full and had only 7% fragmentation. After FIFTEEN hours I stopped it only to find the disk now had 15% fragmentation. From a search on the web, others have had their whole disk trashed becaused they couldn't get it to stop. Also the interface seems kind of flakey, not well integrated. As to the question, does it screw up your system like version 4.0. I can't answer that, but I can tell you they log all the changes and you can recover back to the original state if you desire

Another alternative to look at is Systemsuite 5.0. It also has a good set of registry tools, but also a decent defragger. (The best IMHO is Perfect Disk.- but as a stand alone at 45 bucks, it ain't cheap) Its file recovery tools are now where near the strength of System Mechanic's though. Also its antivirus, even though it is from Trend Micro, is weak. It only scans incoming POP3 mail. Outgoing mail and IMAP incoming mail are both ignored. The whole package is, however, much more tightly integrated than System Mechanic

In summary, if you could combine the best of both System Mechanic and Systemsuite you would have a great utilities package.

[Slimy]

^ i agree with you on the most part, system mechanic pro 5 is a big improvement but sitll needs a lot of work

but i've never tried systemsuite

[Pallab]

I won't rate system mech so highly.

I tried it.And well I wud still say Tune up utilities is far better.

Itz reg cleaner is no good.Try a comparision with rer supreme or da one with Tune up utilities.

Da hdd defragger is also not up to da mark.PD is my choice.

and yeah itz spyware cleaner also isn't up to da mark.

i wud say it is an over-rated soft(bloatware?)

[neatofx]

When I used System Mechanic 5 when it first was released it ****** my system up. I had to do a full reformat after using that. :angry: (N)

[python134r]

I used to use sys mech 4 a while back si I decided to give it a try. All total a decent product. The anti-virus is first rate (Kaspersky, not trend micro as stated above) and the firewall so far seems to be up to the job if your lookin for a software solution.

The registry tools are good. I found that having this proggie and tuneup utilities 2004 I have just about everything I need to keep the rig running well. Mind you all this can be done with stand alone products and the native utilities of the os too. Its just nice ti have them in a suite that altogether works as advertised The weakest links in the package are the spyware tools and of course the defragger while not bad I'll stick with Perfect Disk or Diskeeper and Spybot 1.4 and adaware.

[IK47]

nice stuff