System Mechanic 6
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Iolo System Mechanic 6

A range of useful tools and utilities to keep your PC in tip-top condition

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Price: $69.95 (approx £40)
Manufacturer: Iolo
Specifications:
Ratings
Overall rating: Overall rating
Features: Features
Ease of use: Ease of use
Value for money: Value for money
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Verdict

Pros: Huge array of tools; easy to use
Cons: Inadequate documentation
Overall: A very powerful suite of Windows tools that aid in the maintenance, protection and recovery of your system

Paul Monckton, Personal Computer World 13 Mar 2006

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Iolo ’s System Mechanic 6 is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to keep your PC running efficiently and safe from Internet nasties, such as spyware and viruses.

This latest version has an updated user interface that’s easier to operate and offers more features and flexibility than previous editions.

Iolo touts a total of 13 new or improved features in version 6, including a high-speed disk defragmenter, full disaster recovery, startup manager and one-click Power Tools that run through selected common procedures with just a single click.

System Mechanic Professional’s new dashboard interface gives you automated, wizard-driven tools that analyse and rate your system’s health, finding problems and giving you the option of fixing them.

This analysis covers six main areas - Clutter, Speed, Safety, Fitness, Update and Active Care.

Each of these are rated with a simple traffic light indicators that show you at a glance where your PC may require attention. Clicking on any of these indicators provides more detailed information on what has been discovered.

A huge array of individual, single-purpose tools is also provided that enable you to perform tasks such as increasing your Internet and hard drive speed, sorting out your Windows startup items, recovering lost data and managing system memory.

It also provides secure deletion of unwanted data as well as a grab bag of system customization tools.

In fact there are so many tools that it would be easy to become lost among them were it not for System Mechanic 6 Professional’s fully-integrated and rather well thought-out user interface.

A Windows help file is provided which covers most aspects of operation. Even so, a proper user guide would have been a welcome addition and we felt some of the automated tools didn’t provide quite enough detail on the changes they were about to make to our system.

On the whole though, System Mechanic 6 is a decent collection of tools and utilities.

System requirements:
128MB Ram
60MB hard disk
Windows 98/2000/2003/XP

See also:

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Review: Stellar Phoenix Fat + NTFSDifficult to use, expensive and limited features in this data recovery utility  02 Mar 2006
Review: PC Tools File Recover 5A simple-to-use data recovery utility  02 Mar 2006
Review: Ontrack Easy Recovery LiteWell established in the data recovery market, and offering labs-based services too  02 Mar 2006
Review: Active Data Recovery Active@ UndeleteA workmanlike data recovery utility with a simple user interface  02 Mar 2006
Review: AVG Free for LinuxAn easy to use, free anti-virus software for Linux  27 Feb 2006
Review: SystemOK Home SecurityBackup and recovery software that's apparently 'granny-proof'  23 Feb 2006
Orlogix Replace MyPCTransfer data from one PC to another, while securely erasing files from your old hard drive  20 Jan 2006
Updated interface and more advanced compression  12 Jan 2006

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