Smart PC Professional is a utility program available only by downloading it from the internet.

It claims to fix, clean and optimise your PC, and its control panel is equipped with three buttons, labelled accordingly.

Clicking the Fix button repairs the Windows Registry and any missing shortcuts. The Registry, which you can be forgiven for not having heard of, is a sort of filing cabinet where Windows keeps all its program settings.

Over time, some of these become redundant as programs are deleted or updated, and Smart PC Professional tidies them up.

It's debatable whether there's any advantage in tidying up the Registry because if there's a serious problem with it, Windows automatically switches to a backup version anyway, and if the problem is serious enough to prevent Windows starting, then you can't run Smart PC Pro either.

Smart PC Pro is reasonably competent at identifying Registry irregularities, but not as adept as many other programs.

Rather annoyingly, it applies the fixes automatically instead of displaying information about the problems and asking for confirmation, which is the usual approach.

The Clean button removes junk files and cleans up your tracks by erasing browser histories and the like; tasks which can be performed without the aid of Smart PC by using the Windows Disk Cleanup applet and the Preferences settings of your web browser.

The remaining cleaning facility is not found elsewhere within Windows. It identifies and deletes duplicate files in order to save disk space: a useful feature, but it would be even better if you could search your entire computer in one pass instead of having to run the program separately for each disk.

The Optimize button groups together a number of familiar Windows settings in one convenient location. It also offers an uninstaller and a task scheduler, but choosing either of these simply starts up the equivalent Windows application.

The only unique feature is a Windows speed booster, which works by assigning more of the processor's time to the current task, but on our test PC, turning on the speed booster had no perceptible effect on performance.

At almost £30, it seems overpriced considering Windows already has the tool to do most of what's on offer. However, there is a 30-day demo available from the website to try before you buy.

Related reviews
XP Tuning Suite 3
Verdict: A good set of tweaks and customisations for XP, but the sheer number of tools on offer can be a little daunting
Rating: 4/5
Price: £20