System Mechanic

Strength:
New interface and more tools, including security tools; Easy of use; an all-in-one program

Weakness:
Uses new antivirus and new firewall technology which may fall short of existing solutions


Benefits:
Rather than license existing antivirus and firewall technology, the publishers created their own in-house security products. While this ensures the security apps will play well with the existing Iolo tools, these are largely unproven applications competing in a mature and competitive field.

Iolo Search and Recover, available as a standalone product, is now included within System Mechanic. Search and Recover allows you to search your hard drive for that missing file that you know exist, and, if you happened to have deleted it somehow, Iolo gives you a tool to recover it. This can be very handy.

DriveScrubber is another good feature. If you ever sell you PC, you'll want to not only delete the data, but overwrite it with ones and zeros several times so that the data will be unrecoverable. System Mechanic 7 Professional includes this tool with options to scrub one file, a specific folder, or an entire drive. Also you can set it to automatically scrub whenever you delete a file.

There's also a pop-up blocker feature within System Mechanic 7 Professional but we found this feature totally useless. I used the Firefox Internet browser yet Iolo provides pop-up protection only for Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera. Netscape and Opera currently occupy less than 1 percent of the Internet Browser market; Firefox is currently over 10 percent. That said, all of these browsers, even Firefox, now provide their own pop-up protection, so this feature is unnecessary.

Missing from within System Mechanic 7 Professional are tools to block spam, stop phishing attempts, and prevent rootkits from installing on your PC.

Setup
The setup for System Mechanic 7 Professional was unnecessarily challenging. Even with a disc from Iolo, we were asked to enter a long license number, then, a few screens later, enter an even longer registration number. That's a lot of numbers to key in, and if you make a mistake it's hard to find which character is out of place or entered wrong. You'd think you were entering the access code for Fort Knox.

During installation we were asked to agree with a standard end-user license agreement. Only later we did realise that data from our hard drive was being collected and sent back to the Iolo. How do we know that? Visitors to the Iolo Threat Center see the latest statistics from System Mechanic users worldwide, displaying percentages of cluttered files on people's machines, or how defragmented their hard drive is. We could find no way to opt out of this, either during the setup process or after out installation. We think it's wrong that Iolo collects such data without our explicit permission.

Should you want to remove Iolo System Mechanic 7 Professional, there is no uninstall icon.
You will need to use the Windows Control Panel, then Add or Remove Programs. After a reboot, we discovered several system registry entries remained for System Mechanic 7 Professional.

Interface
For System Mechanic 7 Professional, Iolo redesigned its interface. In addition to the familiar speed meter showing your system status as good, fair, or poor, there are right-hand menus that locate specific tools, although most user interface studies have shown the left-hand side of the screen to be the user's sweet spot, visually. Indeed, several times we had to remember that the navigation was on the right, not the left. The left side is occupied by a combined diagnostics test. In previous versions you had to analyse and run separate tools, which was a pain. This is an improvement, of sorts. Within System Mechanic 7 Professional, you only run one, and quickly, you'll see what needs to be fixed in one listing.

Unlike system Mechanic 6 Professional, which periodically asked me to download the latest updates, System Mechanic 7 Professional makes the update process more automatic. This is a welcome change, but it also highlights my concern that too many of the processes within System Mechanic now occurs in the background.

What's truly frustrating about the new interface is that unlike earlier versions where you could check the items you wanted -- and uncheck those you did not -- you are strongly encouraged to accept Iolo's word that all the changes recommended are the best for your PC.
Only by selecting Remove Manually did we see what Iolo had flagged. In most cases these were minor shortcuts and cookies and other items that we did not think warranted removal, and ultimately we unchecked them. We also question the hyperbolic terminology. "Warning" implies danger, and we don't see how two broken shortcuts on our test PC rise to that level. If anything, in simplifying its interface, Iolo has weakened System Mechanic's credibility to diagnose truly severe problems.


System Requirements
There are several platforms for running System Mechanic 7, such as Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP, as well as Vista. The RAM is estmated 128MB or above, otherwise the launching speed is not quick.

Conclusion
We found the technical support for System Mechanic 7 Professional to be light. There's no PDF manual, for example. The in-program Help feature is adequate, but we'd prefer more detail about the specific tools within the program. Online, the knowledge base is also rather light, available either by asking the right questions or by searching an index.

Based on past performance, we eagerly awaited System Mechanic 7 Professional, only to be disappointed. Instead of a pure system-utility suite, the System Mechanic has morphed into an all-in-one security suite -- and may have taken on too much in this release. To be a true security suite, tools are needed to block spam, phishing attacks, and rootkits.