Review: System Mechanic 10

Iolo's System Mechanic 10 can be installed on three different PCs under its Whole Home Licensing Program.

I really do feel sorry for my poor laptop. While there's little doubt that it's a thing of beauty, I'm constantly installing and uninstalling apps to review or just try out.

The upshot of all this geek tweakery is umpteen gazillion layers of digital detritus that sees my poor laptop developing Alzheimer's and taking forever to boot with launching applications being about as fast as a slug on sleeping pills.

While I'd downloaded a bunch of apps to 'declutter' my PC, what was really needed was a simple tool that bought together a bunch of other handy utilities to keep my PC zippy, tuned and trim from the excesses of bloatware.

Iolo technologies must've heard my laments as they launched System Mechanic 10 - the earlier version 9 sibling is easily one of the top PC maintenance tools I've used.

Prior to installing System Mechanic, my PC's boot time was a shade under four frustrating, hair-pulling minutes, and applications seemed to take an eternity to load and execute.

Unleashing System Mechanic 10 on my decrepit machine had me running a bunch of bundled apps such as CRUDD Remover which let me choose which programs to keep and which to consign to the great recycle bin in the sky.

After 10 minutes it had removed a massive amount of junk from my hard drive, freeing up close to 120MB of space.

Perhaps the most intriguing app was the Program Accelerator, which according to the press blurb accompanying System Mechanic 10 "speeds up program performance by intelligently realigning programs with their dependent files.".

Blurb aside, the Accelerator looked a lot like a disk defragmenter, and I left it running overnight. Cutting a long story short, the programme accelerator was the digital equivalent of Wintel Viagra, - programmes promptly snapped to attention after a brief mouseclick. It felt like I'd got a zippy new PC without all the styrofoam packaging, useless CDs and multi-page legalese-filled license agreements.

My broadband connection pootles along at a fairly brisk clip (8-12Mbps is commonly reported by most speedtest applications) however Windows (like many other computer OS's) is, by default, not optimised for DSL which can lead to some internet sluggishness. Firing up Internet Connection Repair saw it examining my connections and repairing it to ensure that my broadband connection was as fast as possible.

Whilst the bevy of 'optimise and repair' solutions bundled by Iolo made a massive difference to my overworked and bloated laptop, one of its most attractive aspects was the Whole Home Licensing Program, which means that with just a single end user license, it can be installed across all the PCs in my home, effectively tripling its usefulness in a few simple steps.

So the Verdict? System Mechanic 10 represents a solid and substantial improvement over earlier iterations. For a stress free way of speeding up bloated and slow PCs it's pretty hard to beat.

System Mechanic 10, $49.95 RRP