In James <
[email protected]> had this to say:
My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:
Okay... so there's more to this story? I'm all ears.
I have used System Mechanic (from IOLO) for a rather long time now. Why?
Because it's a fairly good generic product that does a generally good job.
Here's what I do with it:
I allow it to clean my cookies - it keeps the ones I selected it to keep and
remembers those settings.
It cleans my temp files but again allows me to select which ones I want to
keep and remembers them. In fact it does find all sorts of temp and zero
length files all over the place and does a pretty good job with it.
I don't usually allow it to scan my registry but I have and it's never
broken anything. I'm a bit old school with the whole registry thing. I do
let it scan once in a while but then I delete the items manually after
checking them. I've given it a go all on it's own and let it run fully and
it did not break anything.
I can uninstall software from within the application. I can also use it to
delete duplicate files. What I don't suggest is that most people use it to
delete duplicate files. You can, and probably will, break something. Some
files are duplicates for a reason. They need to be checked. Today's version
actually has a "holy crap" button where it keeps the files you deleted just
in case and then deletes them when you do a cleanup again.
Let's see... You can automatically fix broken shortcuts or delete them if
the target is not found. The newer version even has an option to recover
deleted data.
The newest will check for spyware, it's not the best search and it hasn't
found anything yet so I don't know how well it works. (I have MSAS running
with it's real time protection activated.)
It has a decent defrag utility. I don't know if they licensed that from
someone else or if it was in-house. It even has boot-time defrag of the MFT,
page file, and registry hives.
You can manage your startup items and save alternate configurations. That
has come in handy more than one time.
I'd like to list all of the tweaks that it has in a tweaking section but
that would take too long to type I'm afraid. It does have some nice ones and
I've been known to use them before mostly because I like the idea of doing
as much as I can with one application so that I know where I need to go to
reverse it should it happen to have been a bad choice.
Err... Well... It DOES have the RAM defrag option but we all know what I
think about those probably so you can understand that that's not an option I
use and wouldn't suggest anyone else bother with either.
Anyhow, you can find loads more in the trial version. You can also opt to
install a firewall and AV software with it. I never have and doubt I ever
will. What I do like about this particular application is that the firewall
and AV options are seperate. They don't run as a suite so if one goes down
you're not entirely compromised. That's one of the reasons I try to
recommend people looking for alternatives as opposed to full blown suite
applications for security software.
You can do things like scrub your drive and securely erase data. It's really
rather nice and I've been using it for ages. I did end up buying their
toolkit that they were selling from tigerdirect.com a couple of years ago.
I've since abandoned it for ERD. I have the current version loaded on this
system. It's 5.0 Professional. I would recommend the professional version
over the regular version for the additional tools.
Here's some additional information:
http://www.iolo.com/sm/5pro/index.cfm
On a scale of 1 to 10 I give the product an 8.7 and I think that I generally
rate products pretty hard.
Galen
--
"But there are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world
without them."
Sherlock Holmes
) Carey is the only other MVP that supports this