PC World rates System Mechanic as a good all-around PC care utility, "designed to fix, speed up, de-clutter and protect your PC".

Has anyone had any experience with this utility, good, bad or otherwise?

Or can anyone recommend another similar utility that they have had good success with?

Thanks in advance........

_________________
BB
http://barrypatch.net

Modern operating systems do not require such utilities, period.

_________________
Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Well Patty, I can see that you are still on the fence regarding these utilities,

Seriously, I value your opinion and will save my time and money.

Thank you.............

_________________
BB
http://barrypatch.net

I agree with Patty, if you've got Windows 7 or 8 you've got all the programs you need to take care of the operating system built in.

_________________
Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com

LOL BB... fences have never particularly been my thing.

_________________
Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

What did the song say?...

"And the sign said no trespassing, violators shot on site. So I stood on the fence and yelled at the house, 'who gave you the right....". Always liked that song, Signs. When I was in high school we did what was then called a 'speed flick' where images flashed to the beat of music as an English class project. We used the song Signs for the music. Phew, put a LOT of hours in to that project. This was in the early 70's and we used 8mm film for the video. Count frames, cut film, count frames, cut film, splice cut frames... on and on and on. Sounds tedious but it was a blast. I was mostly just bored in school. This English teacher was one of the few that held my attention.

_________________

I agree that such utilities are not needed. Some, particularly the registry cleaners, can be very aggressive and actually damage your system by deleting important registry keys. Having said all that, I find the free CCleaner a handy utility to automatically delete files that tend to stick around far too long - http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

_________________
Best regards,
Manny Carvalho
MS-MVP since 2002

I had a client just last week whose installation of QuickBooks got hosed by some sort of registry cleaner. The program would not open, with a really strange error message saying that this version of QuickBooks required Internet Explorer version 6 or greater. <g> He was, of course, running IE9.

Here's the kicker though... it took me probably 2 hours to find and solve the problem. Some of that admittedly due to bogus info from Intuit. Nonetheless, this was a case of a registry key being removed.

_________________
Patty MacDuffie
Computer Haven Administrator

Live Long and Prosper
Mr. Spock

Indeed, after uninstalling CC from my old system, I reinstalled it with the system I purchased last November. I was amazed at how much junk it found and I thought that I knew all junk's hiding places. CC has a reputation for being able to find a lot of true junk while at the same time being "gentle" with the registry, not that I am recommending that it be used as a registry cleaner.

Last year, when I still had CC on my old system, I tried an experiment. I installed two other registry cleaners (freebies) that were the most popular according to my Google searches (I don't remember their names anymore). I used all three without actually deleting any registry entries. Sure enough, the other two programs found many more entries to be deleted than did CC which proves to me that CC was playing it safe. Don't get me wrong, I still don't recommend any registry cleaner.

Anyway, since CC has found many, many more mbs of junk than the program itself takes up on my system and since my new system has a solid state drive which, as I understand it, you actually increase the life of a SSD by keeping it "slim", it stays installed.

Acadia

_________________
The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution. -- Emerson