Consumer Alert: System Mechanic Professional 7

I recently purchased System Mechanic 7 Professional because I had some slowing of my machine and my Anti-Virus subscription ran out so I thought I would give it a shot. I made the mistake of purchasing the program without using the 30 day trial, and it turned out to be a big mistake. System Mechanic Professional is made up of 3 basic components, first there are the system tools, second an antivirus, and third a firewall. I will discuss the three basic components.

First the system tools are a set of utilities that help fix and optimize your PC. Many of the tools work very well, and do make a significant difference in PC performance. Purchasing the standard version includes all of these tools. I have had a little trouble with the disk defragmenter utility because it freezes halfway through the process. But with that exception it has worked well.

The Antivirus is the worst I have used. It hogs system resources and is very slow and tedious. The worst component is the email scanner. When it would start it would run for hours using %90 of the processor resources and when running would not allow us to send and receive email. I have since uninstalled the Iolo antivirus and loaded AVG Free and all of my problems disappeared. In fact the AVG antivirus found 2 viruses that iolo missed.

The firewall is very effective at blocking all traffic on the internet. It requires manual configuration for any interactive web sites, so for a blogger and techie like me it would have taken hours to get it set up so all of my web applications would run correctly. It was just to impractical to use.

If you need system tools to tune up your PC the standard version is capable and I reluctantly say may be worth the $39, however the Professional version that includes the antivirus and firewall should be avoided at all costs. Even with the system tools you should take advantage of the 30 free trial to make sure it works well for your system. Iolo will not issue refunds after the purchase for any reason, But that’s to be understood. I would have a hard time standing behind the product too.