Iolo ’s System Mechanic 6 is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to keep your PC running efficiently and safe from Internet nasties, such as spyware and viruses.

This latest version has an updated user interface that’s easier to operate and offers more features and flexibility than previous editions.

Iolo touts a total of 13 new or improved features in version 6, including a high-speed disk defragmenter, full disaster recovery, startup manager and one-click Power Tools that run through selected common procedures with just a single click.

System Mechanic Professional’s new dashboard interface gives you automated, wizard-driven tools that analyse and rate your system’s health, finding problems and giving you the option of fixing them.

This analysis covers six main areas - Clutter, Speed, Safety, Fitness, Update and Active Care.

Each of these are rated with a simple traffic light indicators that show you at a glance where your PC may require attention. Clicking on any of these indicators provides more detailed information on what has been discovered.

A huge array of individual, single-purpose tools is also provided that enable you to perform tasks such as increasing your Internet and hard drive speed, sorting out your Windows startup items, recovering lost data and managing system memory.

It also provides secure deletion of unwanted data as well as a grab bag of system customization tools.

In fact there are so many tools that it would be easy to become lost among them were it not for System Mechanic 6 Professional’s fully-integrated and rather well thought-out user interface.

A Windows help file is provided which covers most aspects of operation. Even so, a proper user guide would have been a welcome addition and we felt some of the automated tools didn’t provide quite enough detail on the changes they were about to make to our system.

On the whole though, System Mechanic 6 is a decent collection of tools and utilities.

System requirements:
128MB Ram
60MB hard disk
Windows 98/2000/2003/XP