About a month and a half ago I wrote iolo System Mechanic 14 Professional Restores Computer Speed. Now that it has been doing its job on my system, it is time to revisit the software and let you know how it is working for me. I’ll also pass along a coupon from the folks at iolo that allows you to get a copy at a huge discount.

When it is first installed, you’ll be asked to optimize your system. This process can take some time. In my case, I started the process near the end of the workday and let it run while I was away from my computer. I’m guessing it took around two hours on both my desktop and my laptop.

Once your system is initially optimized, System Mechanic is mostly invisible. The most obvious thing that I see is the ActiveCare app that runs when your computer isn’t being actively used. If it detects there is no activity on your computer, it will start the optimizing process in the background. As soon as you move your mouse or touch a key on the keyboard, it will stop and wait for another period of inactivity. A couple of times I have chosen not to interrupt it and it probably takes 10-15 minutes to complete all of its tasks. In many cases, you may not even know it has completed if you are away from your computer during its whole run.

If you choose to run the LiveBoost application, it will work to boost the responsiveness of your system by calibrating your processor, memory and hard drive in real-time. Below is a graphic it provides showing a constantly updated snapshot of my system performance.

When I look at the overview of my system in the System Mechanic software, it shows three scores of my overall system status. At the bottom are Health and Security and you’ll note the health of my system is slightly less than optimal. I’m not concerned as it will get back to green the next time that ActiveCare optimizes my system. In short, it would be rare for the Health to drop below the yellow zone.

Rather than opening the software, I can also look at the widget running on my Windows 7 desktop (shown at right). Since I will rarely open the software, this is a much quicker way for me to know how my system in doing.

It is hard to give data that proves how well System Mechanic is working for me. The good news is that it just works and doesn’t interfere with the other tasks I’m trying to complete. So while I can’t give you a specific amount of performance it has added to my system, I can say that I’m happy it is working hard for me behind the scenes and it has my system running very smoothly.

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