14 DAY TRIAL // Comodo is best known for its super flexible, easy to use and comprehensive firewall application that on top of it all also happens to be a freebie. But besides this its developers also released a bunch of apps mainly related to maintaining the system as clean as possible and reduce drop in performance.
System Cleaner, a suite that includes a registry, disk, privacy cleaner and OS tweaking features is as large a piece of software as COMODO Firewall and is also released free of charge and with absolutely no strings attached. The application is designed to thoroughly scan computers of useless data and spit it out of the system thus improving overall performance.
Looks are not incentive and there is nothing impressing about them. Everything is designed to be clear and accessible for any user. No bells and whistles, no useless information, only the essential is present in the interface of the application. Menus are organized in modules which cover clean-up instruments, utilities and miscellaneous. Reigning over these is the Summary section, which provides general info on the system, application version, last update time as well as access to the three cleaners the app is equipped with: registry cleaner, disk cleaner and privacy cleaner.
The System information section of the software picks up all the details directly from Windows so it is as accurate as MSInfo. On the test computer it had a slight problem and displayed the amount of RAM installed on the system erroneously. Comodo System Cleaner took for granted this detail and displayed the system as having 12GB of RAM out of which only 783 were used which is way too far-fetched.
Registry Cleaner
Scanning the registry for invalid keys and values and eliminating them leads to increased system performance and stability. Comodo brings the simplest approach to the matter offering three simple menus and easy picking of the registry areas to be scanned.
It can analyze startup locations, application paths, shared DLLs, font and uninstall locations, file associations, shared folders, system services, help locations, but it can also perform an in-depth search, which deals with checking paths from software location; if a piece of software does not physically exist all related entries will be eliminated. Time to complete the job is far from fast as all other test apps we faced it with finished with an advance of at least one minute. During the process you know exactly what part of the registry is being checked and the total progress of the operation. There is no time estimation and only a progress bar should do, but this is common in most registry cleaners. Unfortunately the process may get to a point and seem stuck there when in fact it just takes longer to scan the area, just bear with it.
To avoid unnecessary trouble after the cleaning process is complete, before dumping any data, Comodo System Cleaner will create a backup copy of the registry which you can restore at any time. So each time you perform a scan the application will automatically create the safety net to revert the registry to its previous state in case of system failure.
The Settings menu of the Registry Cleaner makes available options for planning future scans and performing automatic cleaning or enabling the creation of a restore point before proceeding to eliminating the invalid entries detected. It also shelters the creation of registry backup before any modification is performed.
Registry Protection is patent pending technology and is in the business of backing up registry hives before any cleaning operation. The advantage of the feature is that if the system fails to restart after cleaning Windows Registry is automatically restored to its previous state and the system is rebooted. Then registry protection provides the option of accepting the changes or restoring the registry to its anterior state.
Although it looks rather stiff, Comodo's Registry Cleaner module allows you to create an Ignore List to include entries that should be skipped during scan.
During our tests the application did good and definitely had an edge over other registry cleaners we faced it with. It managed to detect the largest number of obsolete and erroneous entries. Upon eliminating them the number of invalids dropped drastically in all other cleaners. However, not all detected entries could be deleted in the first run and even further scan and clean operations were futile against the nasty invalids. Also, completing the registry check took quite a while.
More bad news comes along the way when trying to schedule a task as in a multi-user environment the application will prompt for an account password. If the current account is not protected by a password then the scheduling will fail.
On the upside, you are shown all registry entries and at a right click these can be added to the Ignore List or de-selected from the scan list. More than this, a log of all the actions undertaken can be seen in the Settings area.
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