14 DAY TRIAL // Diagnose System
The second module in the program deals with analyzing the system performance, scanning it for security problems. It includes utilities for optimizing system configuration and disk defragmentation.
Bringing your machine to a snappier run can be done by adjusting what the system runs and how it behaves. In our case Advanced SystemCare found 12 issues that acted as performance bottlenecks for the test system. Two of them were related to visual effects and the recommended options were to reduce the delay time for showing menus from 400 to 200 and VisualFXSetting registry key to a custom value of 3.
Services are also taken into consideration and in our case six of them were sentenced to being disabled by the program in order to increase performance. I would be very careful with turning services off as these are an important component in Windows and may cause trouble if they are stopped.
We were advised to disable a set of services that would prevent certain activities through Group Policy. For a regular home user Group Policy may be something unknown, but in corporate environment this is a Windows feature that allows an administrator to control what users can do on the system.
During our tests, the set of six services Advanced SystemCare proposed to disable were indeed dispensable for a regular user, but you should definitely give this section a gander before agreeing with the application, just to be on the safe side.
The last section ASC decided to tackle in order to improve system responsiveness was system responsiveness. And the four issues it suggested to be fixed were all related to crash control: send alert, enable the creation of a dump file, log event or report. By default the values for all these was zeros, which is the value for disabled. Some users may not want to know what caused the system crash, but I am definitely not one of them.
Security Defense component in the module is designed to block installation of ActiveX-based spyware, adware and other such pests. The entire protection relies on a list of malware included in the application, so you are not protected 100%. You can choose the threats you want the system to be immunized against.
The last issue recommended by the suite in order to keep the computer running at its full speed was file fragmentation of the system drive. The scan for fragments reported more than 2100 fragmented files and a fragmentation rate of only 2%, which is a value way under all other defraggers we compared it to reported. On the other hand, the amount of fragmented file varied very little around the 2100 files in all other programs.
Defrag results were quite encouraging as the procedure brought the amount of fragmented files around 240. This was confirmed by different programs used in the test.
Security Analizer is a simple tool that checks your computer for any sort of highjacked settings. It found no problems during our tests, but it is recommended to take a good look at the findings and have the log analyzed by people more proficient on the matter (the report is compatible with HiJackThis log).
Diagnose System module is not as complicated as it may appear at the beginning. It will check the system drive for security loopholes spyware may use or verify if your settings have been hijacked. However, the strong point in the entire module is the defragmentation service which does a very good job.
The recommendations for system configuration in order to gain some speed were not particularly efficient in our case. Also, it would have been nice to have a description of the effects of the modification attached to each suggested improvement.
Despite the great intentions of this module, its functionality is very well under what Maintain Windows has to offer, and even the set of extra utilities the developer included in the suite. Besides defragmentation (which takes care only of the system drive) all security and optimization options could be replaced or given up altogether.
Security can be replaced because with free software on the market that can tackle spyware and other threats better. As far as the optimization recommendations for our test system go, they are not crucial for increasing performance and some of them may be something the user does not want to trade in.
