System Mechanic

[Den]

Does any one use/or have used System Mechanic and what do you think of it? I have had it on my last couple of computers and have insatalled it on my new one but am starting to think its a bit intrusive, any thoughts?

[Glenn]

It does nothing you can't do yourself with CCleaner and Auslogic Defrag or maybe some other free utils.

[Technical Ben]

Personally I'm of the opinion "if it isn't broke, don't fix it!"
I've seen too many systems grind to a halt due to conflicts or accidental "fixes". Case in point, a friend paid £30 for a defrag program, on a pc not able to run more than 1 program at a time. So of cause, the background defragged made it run worse, when they already have defrag under disk options. 

The program is probably fine, but I like to keep things simple. Virus scanner and a strong resistance to installing anything on my pc.

[Simon]

Isn't System Mechanic by the same people who did Spyware Doctor?  I've used both, but didn't find either very satisfactory, and both were system hogs on my old XP machine.

[Niall]

I use ccleaner, comodo system-cleaner and Avast. Oh and PSI. Add that with common sense and I've never had a problem.

[Simon]

I find PSI part blessing, part curse.  I'm convinced it slows down startup by scanning every time, and I feel compelled to make the orange icon go green again, but other than that, it's good to know everything is up to date.

[talos]

I think System Mechanic is bloatware, I agree with the others, there are plenty of good free apps to do the job

[D-Dan]

None of the so called Tune Up applications on Windows can do anything that you can't do better yourself. Save yourself the time and money, and employ some basic system optimisation yourself (Remove unused programs, check your startup programs and disable those you don't need with msconfig, defrag your drive - the built in defragger is just fine, clear temporary files and, if you have the patience, you could go through your registry and remove obsolete keys manually, too, though be careful with this last one. It's easy to break stuff and it won;t make much of a difference to performance anyway (despite what the sellers of registry cleaners tell you).

[pctech]

I'm not a fan of these applications other than perhaps CCleaner or Revo Uninstaller as removing redundant entries in the registry is a good idea to keep it small although as Steve says its debateable how much of a performance increase this will achieve.

The single best thing you can do is to run regular defrags with Windows' built in tool to reduce the amount of random seeking your hard disk has to perform.

[Niall]

I find PSI part blessing, part curse.  I'm convinced it slows down startup by scanning every time, and I feel compelled to make the orange icon go green again, but other than that, it's good to know everything is up to date.

If you've got an older system it definitely is noticeable. I can't have it start up at boot on my mums laptop, and it won't run at all on her old pc which is worse. On my system it was fine though, and on this one with an SSD for the main drive, it makes no difference at all. The bottle neck at boot on this system now I have an SSD is the keyboard activating via the USB port!

[Niall]

I'm not a fan of these applications other than perhaps CCleaner or Revo Uninstaller as removing redundant entries in the registry is a good idea to keep it small although as Steve says its debateable how much of a performance increase this will achieve.

The single best thing you can do is to run regular defrags with Windows' built in tool to reduce the amount of random seeking your hard disk has to perform.

The trouble is, they don't always do that. If you check your registry you'll see a load of dead entries. No idea why they don't get picked up, but they sit there being all rubbish

[pctech]

If you are brave enough you can always do a bit of pruning with regedit but best to stick to the entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE