PreviousMonday 6 March 2006, 8:54 PM
Iolo Ruined a Previously Great Product
I have been a longtime user of Iolo's System Mechanic. Recently, I upgraded from version 3.8d to 6.0 (sub-version "s"). What used to be a terrific product has turned into something to be avoided. At all costs.
Take TotalPC Care—one of the internal elements of SM6.0. This tool literally takes more than 1 day to execute completely.
It's "listing of recommended changes" tells you nothing of value. Further, at this stage, it still has yet to actually remove/fix anything.... This is just a summary for you to decide to continue with its "recommendations". And it takes even longer to finally “fix” the items it finds as it did to report them.
This product is abysmal.
Consider the registry scan component and one of its findings. In my case, SM6.0 says it found 3 Dangerous entries--but fails to identify what the entries are, exactly. One has no idea what elements it thinks are 'Dangerous', or 'Unnecessary' (another nebulous category in the SM6.0 repertoire).
SM6.0 falsely identified one of my registry elements as being "Dangerous", and will disable it for me—but does not give me the chance NOT to do it, unless I tell SM6.0 not to process ALL of the registry errors it may have found. I should have the ability to choose the granularity of what registry changes I may or may not wish to have modified. This is not provided.
Worse still, is the method by which System Mechanic makes its determination. It seems to make its choice by name recognition only.
For example, I had Canon's Easy Web Print installed on my computer. SM 6.0 falsely identifies this as a "Dangerous" element that is, quote, "bundled with Spyware".
While it is true that toolband.dll can be a spyware variant component of the known, nuisance called CoolWebSearch--because SM 6.0 only relies on the name of the affected file to make the determination, INSTEAD of the more definitive MD5 or CLSID signatures, it cannot distinguish between that which is truly bad and that which is not.
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