System Mechanic 4 Professional offers a better selection of tools and technical support than Norton SystemWorks Professional does.
System Mechanic 4 Professional (SM4P) from Iolo provides real competition for Symantec's venerable Norton SystemWorks Professional. Both utilities suites are Swiss Army Knife packages designed to perform a variety of important functions on your Windows-based computer.
Each covers a lot of the same territory, but they also offer their own specialties. In general, we found the System Mechanic 4 Professional tools to be more useful than those of Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional. SM4P also offers superior, free product help and excellent online tool tutorials -- something Norton does not. In short, Norton SystemWorks had better not rest on its laurels: System Mechanic 4 Professional is a worthy challenger and offers advanced PC users a lot more value.
System Mechanic 4 Professional, which is distributed in Australia through Techtools Australasia, installs from either a 34MB download (US$69.95) or a CD (AU$89.10) and requires an additional 20-character activation code. You can also try a fully functional 30-day shareware version. The utility suite requires at least a 120MHz Pentium processor; Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 or XP; 128MB of RAM; and 60MB of hard disk space. Norton SystemWorks 2004, on the other hand, no longer supports Windows 95, requires a much faster processor and takes up more hard drive space.
Once it's installed, you can access System Mechanic 4 Professional in one of two ways. The first is through the main interface, which divides the many individual tools into six folders: Clean, Fix, Maintain, Optimize, Protect and 1-2-3 Options. Highlighting one of these folders brings up a one-sentence explanation about what it contains and hovering over one of the icons inside a folder gives a detailed explanation about the given tool. Unlike Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional, System Mechanic 4 Professional loads very quickly -- more than three times as fast -- and it's just as easy to navigate, with plenty of labels and hot keys to access folders and programs directly.
Alternatively, you can load many -- but not all -- of the contents of SM4P by double-clicking one of four separate desktop icons. These icons are labelled DriveScrubber/Floppy Creator, System Shield, Panda Antivirus, and Search And Recover. Note that some of System Mechanic 4 Professional's better tools, such as its Registry Cleaner/Optimizer, cannot be accessed through these desktop icons. As a result, we deleted the icons and simply used the main SM4P interface thereafter.
We were impressed that System Mechanic 4 Professional's tools cover many of the bases hit by Norton SystemWorks 2004 -- and go somewhat beyond. For example, System Mechanic 4 Professional includes anti-virus and firewall protection from Panda Antivirus Platinum 7.0, but if you already have adequate Internet protection, you can opt not to load Panda at installation.
System Mechanic 4 Professional excels with its unique tools. The NetBooster module, for instance, lets you optimise network and Internet settings for best speed and viewing, whether you're using a dial-up connection, LAN, cable or ISDN. Memory Mechanic's real-time graph, on the other hand, displays how much memory and CPU your computer is using at any time. There's even an automatic trigger that attempts to recover RAM when it falls beneath a user-determined point, which will be far more useful for those still using Windows 98 and ME than for those using Windows XP. Popup Stopper does a good job of preventing annoying pop-up ads on your desktop while you're surfing the Web. Other tools remove junk files, handle file deletion by overwriting the files multiple times, eliminate spyware and control applications that load when Windows starts.
Although System Mechanic 4 Professional has a tool to repair, optimise and back up your system registry, it doesn't offer anything equivalent to Norton Disk Doctor, which diagnoses and repairs (where possible) disk problems. Of course, Windows supplies ScanDisk, but even the bundled Microsoft application lacks many of Disk Doctor's handy features.
Still, the comprehensive depth of System Mechanic 4 Professional's tools remains considerable. For example, Disk Defragmenter doesn't just defrag a given drive: it lets you create and store multiple profiles (any number of files and/or folders you select) for future defragmentation. This allows you to speed up defragmentation by choosing areas of your hard drive that are used frequently. Iolo Search And Recover not only recovers deleted files, it also recovers deleted email from Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape and Qualcomm's Eudora.
Online support at www.iolo.com includes a FAQ, a searchable knowledge base, lengthy step-by-step tutorials with full colour illustrations for most tools, and tech support via email.
Although there's no printed manual for the product, the built-in help system is context-sensitive. Thus, System Mechanic 4 Professional's help index is well organised and extremely detailed, with plenty of cross-links to useful subjects. For example, support for TCP Large Windows in NetBooster includes links to several other related definitions. You can also add your own annotated comments to any help screen. These are saved as linked notes, which can be recovered anytime using the Options/Annotate menu.
System Mechanic 4 Professional
Company: iolo technologies
Price: AU$89.10
Distributor: Techtools Australasia
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This is apsolutelly brilliant program>It work ewen 4 movies downloading at same time.It manage somehow to recover my RAM,and make PC faster>Same with games,cos I am gamer,work so fine and thanks so much to people who made this software!!!