Thread: System Mechanic 8.5

System Mechanic 8.5 is more than just a disk and registry cleanup tool. It aims to tune your entire system for peak performance.

It will let you optimize just about everything else on your system.

System Mechanic 8.5 uses a dashboard that offers a high-level view of your overall system health. If you prefer fit-and-forget, you can tell System Mechanic 8.5 to take over and clear up the problems it finds. Or, you can control each detail and tell it exactly what you want optimized.

When defragging, in addition to viewing the level of fragmentation in a graphic, you can also choose to see a report that gives you a better view of the graphical representation, and a list of fragmented files and the extent to which they suffer fragmentation. With System Mechanic 8.5 you can choose not to defragment some files if you wish.

System Mechanic 8.5 also gives you control over what the package does automatically. Its ActiveCare function lets you select each function you want done automatically. For most users, this is a valuable choice. And because you can decide how much you want it to do, it's also a real time-saver.



were are some areas in which System Mechanic 8.5 duplicates what's in Windows. The System Details feature gives you the same information you can get from Windows.

There are functions that only System Mechanic 8.5 could perform, such as memory defragmentation. It also claims to optimize your network connection. While it doesn't explain how this is accomplished, System Mechanic did report that our internet connection was able to deliver about 12Mbit/sec, which isn't bad, since our link delivers only 2Mbit/sec.

However, there is one area where System Mechanic 8.5 shows its limitations. System Mechanic includes a utility called DriveSense that reports on the health of your disk drives, warning of impending failure. But it works only with storage that's not part of a RAID array or virtualized in anyway.

The focus on utility and choice makes System Mechanic 8.5 useful, and it presents itself in a way that's as clutter-free as you wish. It offers flexibility for tweaking the settings but doesn't provide the same performanceenhancing boost as TuneUp Utilities 2009.