14 DAY TRIAL // Having your computer in tip top shape can be a painful task for some users as there are many things to do, like memory optimization, disk defragmentation, disk cleaning, registry maintenance or virus checking. With Windows XP, the tools were already available on the Internet and all you had to do was pick a high rated one and start the job.
Vista, however, brought some changes and the maintenance instruments working on the XP operating system won't work on Microsoft's latest. This situation resembles very much the re-inventing the wheel process, as the tools will have to accomplish the same job but in a different environment.
Some PC upkeep tools are also included in the operating system (disk cleaner and defragmenter), but sometimes these are not enough as they do a faulty job and generally a third party software will solve the problem.
Systerac comes with a suite designed to take care of your computer and to bring it to the performance it was built for. Besides the optimization tools Systerac Tools for Vista is equipped with, there are also some instruments designed to protect your data and your privacy.
The price tag of the newest suite from Systerac is $34.95 and you will get a 24MB installer that will take about 40MB of your hard disk. The size occupied on disk is relative as the installation folder will also include the backup for your registry and this can get to sizes larger than 100MB. Before paying the price for the suite, you can test the software yourself for a trial period of 14 days (one day for each tool) with absolutely no restriction.
The design of the clean cut interface integrates perfectly with Vista. All the options are presented in the main panel so there won't be any confusion in selecting the right tool for your task. The fourteen utilities available in the software can assist you (well, they actually do all the hard work) in cleaning the disk(s) of unneeded files in order to increase the free space, improve the overall speed and stability of your PC by optimizing your RAM, find the problems on your hard disk and fix them (you can select each partition at a time), backup your registry before cleaning it, defragmenting the files on the disk, boost the Internet connection, securely delete the sensitive data, manage your startup processes, or remove the tracks left behind during computer use.
The disk cleaning utility will recover disk space occupied by junk files, by data you no longer need and yet it resides on your drives. The options available here allow you to scan all the hard drives installed on the system, on removable drives, on CD/DVD/BD/HD-DVD discs (although I can't imagine what good this would do as if the data is already written to disc it cannot be eliminated), on network drives and on RAM disk drives. The software is flexible enough to let you choose your own locations (folders) you want to be verified for junk files.
At the bottom of this window, there is information concerning the time and date of the latest scan, number of files to be removed and you can also access a list of the removed files. This way, you can check for false positives. The list will open a TXT file containing all the data that has been dumped and the time and date of the removal.
Optimizing the RAM on your computer is an activity that should be performed every time the system is sluggish and crawling to completing trivial tasks. The tool can be efficiently used to defragment the RAM and unlock it. Memory Optimizer can be set to run at system startup and scheduled to perform its activity at a user-defined time interval (maximum interval is 60 minutes). This way, you can forget about it as the application will do its duties at the established time.
However, one shortcoming of this useful tool will prevent you from knowing how much RAM is actually set to be released. The slider defining the value indicates absolutely nothing in this sense. All you can use is a slider you can drag on a scale from 1 to 12 and that is it. Also, you will not be provided with a percentage of the currently used RAM as a bar will be filled up to a certain point and at one end there is the 0% start and at the other the 100% stop. It'll be filled up to a point, but there is no indication of how much that means. However, you will benefit from the actual value of RAM used that is continuously changing corresponding to the process activity.
Checking your disk(s) for errors may prevent a computer disaster and can warn you about the critical state of the drive. Systerac's Disk Doctor is a special tool designed to scan the drives, detect the problems and fix the errors. The scanning time depends entirely on the size of the partition. The mischief in this case comes as the lack of support for the results. The user is kept in the dark as to what the values displayed at the finish of the scan mean. There is absolutely no indication regarding the color code used.
Registry Backup tool goes hand in hand with Registry Doctor as the latter provides a shortcut to the backup option and is also better equipped. Registry Doctor will scan your registry in search for invalid information. The areas to be verified include HKEY_CURRENT_USER, HKEY_USERS, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, invalid DLLs, bad font references (Windows Fonts), invalid file associations and ActiveX and COM files (Typelib/CLSID and Interface). During the scan there is no indication that something is happening, no progress bar or something similar and the Scan button will turn blank. The detected issues will pop up one by one in the Problems window.
Systerac Tools for Vista comes complete with a shutdown tool designed to log off the current user, turn off the computer or restart the system at a user defined time of the day. Additional options available in this window include forcing the programs to close or forcing them only when they freeze. This ensures that the computer will perform the required operation regardless of other processes' activity.
The disposable defragmentation tool sees to the "gathering" of the files on the disk into one place. It eliminates file fragmentation and gives the hard disk the read/write performance it should have. The optimization of the hard disk assures higher speeds in disk operations. The two sets of options in here allow you to choose between defragmenting the entire drive or only certain files (documents, images, audio and video files and installed programs). Additionally, you can opt for skipping large files, a recommended option in the application. The efficiency of the instrument is quite high and at the end of the process you can read a detailed report to see the number of fragments eliminated, or the total number of fragmented files.
I will skip Internet Booster utility as I have no idea how it works because in my case it refused to turn on. Each time I attempted to access it, I was hit by a crash message. After six attempts, I gave up.
Getting to know the insides of your computer can be a pretty difficult task sometimes. However, Systerac incorporates a Hardware Information tool that can give you some clues as to what is your computer made of. The complete list of hardware components needs a few moments to gather the information and the explorer-like handling of the window makes it easy for the user to pass from one item to another. The details on the components are not as accurate as you may think. The information presented in this window actually consists in specific details about the features of the component.
Everybody knows that whenever you delete the data on your hard disk you are actually erasing only its name and the contents are still available for recovery given the right software. Systerac comes strapped with a file shredder to enssure that your sensitive data stays deleted and cannot be recovered by means of using a simple file recovery application. Upon testing the security of this tool, I realized that despite choosing the maximum destruction level (28) for the files, they are still visible with a recovery application. This means that they can be brought from the "dead" quite easily (the test was not performed with a very strong recovery software, but with a free utility you can find on the Internet).
Making your wallpaper change automatically is another of Systerac's non-working options. If Internet Booster kept crashing on me every time I tried to open it, Wallpaper Slideshow did not even blink upon clicking on it. To make no mistake, I tested the product on another computer and the results were exactly the same.
Proceeding to Startup option was absolutely no problem and the application submitted to my wish and opened with no questions asked. The startup manager that popped-up is not a very advanced tool and the only options available are enabling and disabling processes to start with Windows. There is no way you can add new processes so you will have to work with what you already have in the list. However, the information provided by this window may be of great use if you have more than one account on the computer. You can see the residing location and its properties (if it'll load for all the users of the computer or only for the current user).
As stated in the description of Privacy tool incorporated in Systerac Tools for Vista, while surfing on the Internet, the computer will track and store your activity. Privacy tool will help you erase your web surfing tracks (only if you are using Internet Explorer) and the history files in Windows (Start menu, Windows temporaries, clipboard, registry streams and email histories in Outlook/Netscape).
As you can see, you can use any of these files unrestricted in order to maintain your PC or, you can use the last tool that lets loose the one click optimization process. The stages it goes through include registry cleaning and structure, a check for missing files needed by applications, operating system performance increase and a quick cleanup. It does not sum up all the tools available in the suite but deals instead with the most important aspects that need to be taken care of.
The only restriction applied to the software's testing period is the nag screen which is indeed nagging as it recurs at the launch of each application included in the suite. Regarding the trial period, the copy I installed seems to be endless as for the last three days the trial prompt tells me that there are 9 days left. The software has been installed on my computer for a week or so for testing and at day 9, it seems to have stopped recording the passage of time.
The Good
The features listed in the main application window are really appealing and some of the tools are doing a great job. The defragmenter is pretty good and so is the disk cleaner.
As to the interface, it integrates perfectly in the Vista environment and all the options are placed in visible locations so there is nothing complicated in selecting the desired tool.
The Bad
Out of the 14 valuable tools put on display in the main window two of them did not work at all while others could not perform flawlessly and do as they were expected to. I refer to file shredder which did not make my files unrecoverable although I used the maximum protection level. The Privacy tool did not get rid of all the files (Start menu's Recent Documents list was not erased). Memory optimizer has its flaws as well as the Registry Doctor.
The Truth
Considering the baddies scattered all over in the review and in "The Bad" section, I dare say that the price is too much.
All in all, the tools you can truly rely upon are very few and Disk Defragmenter is one of them as well as Registry Backup. Two elements failed to work and every time I closed the application, it crashed.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
