Review: Fix It Utilities Professional 8
You need to maintain your PC regularly to keep it safe and in top working order. Ian Waugh grabs an oil-can and Fix It Utilities 8...
| Product | Fix It Utilities Professional 8 |
|---|---|
| Company | Avanquest |
| Web | Save $15 on Fix-It Utilities Professional 9
|
| Price | $49.95/£29.99 |
| We like | Superb collection of thorough cleaning and fixing utilities |
| We don't like | A little aggressive, some anomalies (see text) |
| Rating | 7/10 |
| Requirements | Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2, Vista (32-bit) |
Just like a car or any other piece of equipment, your PC needs regular maintenance to keep it safe and in optimum working order. This is especially true if you do a lot of miles - or, in PC terms, create a lot of files and install and remove a lot of software.
Avanquest's Fix It Utilities Professional 8 incorporates a vast collection of utilities to help you do just that. It offers five One-Click Solutions - Comprehensive, CleanUp, Protect, FixUp and Optimize.
Comprehensive does everything the other functions do. CleanUp backs up critical files (including the registry), removes unnecessary files and cleans the registry.
FixUp also backs up critical files, fixes broken registry entries, examines your hardware for problems, and checks the status of your hard drives and warns you if it is about to fail (this relies on the drives supporting SMART technology which most modern ones do). Protect Wizard checks for viruses and spyware, and Optimize defragments your hard disks.
You can decide exactly what these functions do by ticking boxes in the Settings page.
Protect and clean
There are two other main sections to the program. Protection houses Anti Virus and Spyware functions, and Maintenance houses five categories - Diagnose, Fix & Maintain, Optimize, Cleanup, and Recovery.
Each of these has several settings and it's worth going through them to make sure you know exactly what each one is doing. Between them they should keep your PC in optimum condition and top working order.
The Anti Virus scan has several options from QuickScan to a DeepScan which can take a while. The Spyware check has similar options.
Our test machine has had more than its share of hard use - programs that had been installed and removed, data saved, edited and deleted. For that reason it is regularly maintained with various utilities and, we thought, the registry was pretty tidy.
Fix It's Registry Fixer, however, found an amazing 874 problems! Most were empty entries although a few pointed to suspect entries that you need to check yourself before deleting.
Jet Defrag sounds like a quick defragmentation function but it was anything but - our test 150Gb drive took almost three hours to defrag. A secondary drive defragged at the same time was deemed pretty tidy and took only one minute. However, running Jet Defrag on it again immediately after showed a very small percentage of fragmentation and took 24 minutes to defrag.
There are several Recovery options to help recover deleted files, create a Restore CD and set System Restore points.
Mr Fix It
In all, Fix It Utilities Professional 8 has one of the most comprehensive and thorough collections of 'fix it' utilities that we've seen in such a package. However, there are a couple of caveats...
First of all, installation. This is easy although it takes a while but it seems quite aggressive, settling deep into your system. You cannot, for example, stop Fix It running when you boot up. It's not as simple as deactivating it with msconfig (System Configuration Utility).
And when it's running, you can't stop it entirely. Most such programs have a Task Bar icon have an Exit option but not Fix It. You can, however, disable individual functions.
Why did we want to do this? Because after installation our email stopped working and disabling Fix It would have been an easy way to see if it was the culprit. As it happens we disabled AutoEmailScan and got our email back. We then tried to adjust the email setting in the Settings tab but the program hung although the changes we made had, in fact, taken and sorted the problem. However, this was a bit of a techy solution and it's doubtful if a beginner would have solved it.
For a program hot on security, we did notice that Fix It tried to transmit email messages every now and again but we've no idea what they would contain. Our firewall gave us the heads-up and we prevented transmission although this process is not uncommon in such software and we've no reason to suppose it was malicious.
It's worth pointing out, too, that on our, admittedly packed, PC many of the scans took quite a while. There's no Pause function so you can't stop a process while you do something else. The Anti Virus and Spyware scan, for example, prevented us sending email. So only run the scans when you don't need to do anything else.
One virus scan reported a Trojan in a file. We told the program to fix it , it said that it had but another scan showed it hadn't. We went round in circles like this for ages and the trojan never was removed...
Conclusion
There's no doubt that Fix It Utilities Professional 8 contains a very powerful set of functions for keeping your system in top shape. However, our enthusiasm is tempered by various factors including a feeling that it might be just a bit too aggressive and integrates just a little too much into your system although it's probably no worse than Norton on that account.And some parts of the program threw up anomalies which really should not have happened. Given that, an ideal scenario would be being able to launch the utilities when required rather than having them embedded into your system but that's not currently an option.
But given the amount and depth of cleaning and fixing it does, it's difficult not to like it. However, we could only recommend it to users who are prepared to accept the anomalies in return for the cleaning power, who know what they're doing and are familiar with file types, registry entries and so on. It's certainly one of the most thorough utilities we've looked at.
Download a trial version of Avanquest Fix-it Utilities Professional
