Have you heard of "System Mechanic"???

I got a "free trial" offer for something called "System Mechanic" from a company called Iolo, with their website at ioloco.info (seems like the same thing as at iolo.com, but...) and was wondering if any of you have heard of and/or have had any experiences with it. It claims to clean up an old system and get its speed back, which is of course a problem many of us face... frankly, if there's something that does a decent job of cleaning up a three-year-old XP Pro system, I'd be willing to use it...

What say?

 

I'd stay away from a domain like that. google it first and read some reviews. I recall I used a similar product long time ago but I wasn't impressed!

 

I'd rather go for this basic computer maintenance at: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650 than trying something else. Very safe!!

This How to Protect yourself from malware is also very much recommended. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=44525

 

The ioloco.info site struck me as likely being some reseller trying to push the product (or worse, a virus pusher). There is a real site at iolo.com which seems authentic enough, and I didn't see any "free trial" offers there, which reinforces my feeling about the dot-info site.

I understand what is being said about such products in general - my preference has always been for dogged, manual intervention... but I have a limited amount of time to spend on such things, and it seems that if a relatively inexpensive product (I think it's $40 for "up to five systems") will clean things up enough to make some of the dogs at least usable, it would certainly be worthwhile... Hell, I'd love to have something I could drop on folks' desktop that they could run and would defrag, reg clean, de-advertise, and list programs to consider removing based on not being used and/or being missing reg entries.

That's why I'm asking if anybody's used this one!

Does it work? Maybe it's complete crapm, but on the other hand I'm sure there are similar products that work at least a little bit - still, I've seen HDDs nailed flat by crappy defraggers and programs disabled by sorry registry cleaners, so I thought I'd check and see if someone here has tried it and has a "Yea" or "Nay" opinion about it.

Thanks for the responses!

 

What sort of folks?

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/System_Mechanic_d98.html

Only a 2.35 rating and shareware ($39.95) at that.

 

Folks who complain their computers are running slow - which, of course, they are - and don't want, or can't afford, to pay the local computer store $50 or more to clean it up... if it does some good, for $10 or $15, then why not?

 

Hah! Obviously I searched in the wrong place... here (the forum) I found diddle e squat about it.

Thanks!

 

Still have to learn that Major Geeks is more than just a forum.
Plenty of virus and spyware-free downloads to be found also.

 

No doubt about it... it just didn't occur to me to look in that section, although I've certainly picked up defraggers and reg cleaners there.

Is there a "system-wide" search anywhere? It might be handy to have... maybe the thing to do would be to list all the descriptive blurbs as forum entries, and then they'd be searchable... yeah, that's the ticket!

 

Shorttex,
I think the few responses you got is a good indicator of the lack of interest the people here have in these "fix all" products. They simply don't really exist. Poor performance can come from autoruns, file conflicts, malware, corrupt files, hardware problems, bad drivers...
I haven't seen any one product, free or not, that really addresses all of this. But a lot of people in this forum do!
Best regards.

 

You're right, so far as I know, because I've never seen one that actually did a friggen thing to speed up a Windows box it was run on... 'Course, that's basically about zero for ... maybe ... two or three. But that one caught my eye, so I figgered it was worth asking.

Thanks for responding.

 

Actually, cough, there are a few that will do "do some work" at "taking out the Trash", and they are posted on this website,

Advance System Care, does a fair job, and it's free,
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Advanced_SystemCare_3_d5927.html

Once having run ASC, download this defragger, free also and run it
http://www.majorgeeks.com/JkDefrag_d5542.html

another good program to have and use, yep also available from MajorGeeks,
CCleaner, which contains a good "junk file remover", real basic Registry Cleaner and by clicking Tools Startup, you can see what programs you are loading,

http://www.majorgeeks.com/CCleaner_Slim_No_Yahoo_Toolbar_English_d4191.html

Hard part of CCleaner/Tools/Startup is figuring out "what to disable"(note: always disable, in case you find out you need that program), but this site may help to identify the startup programs, http://www.tasklist.org/

Bear in mind, most of the programs out there that do Registry, Defrag, Clean Fix etc.. you have to try em and find what works for your PC. But the above programs, will help and they are all available for MajorGeeks