System Mechanic puts PC slowdown in reverse

October 31, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Over time, rooms in your home get messier, cars break down and your computer operates more slowly. This phenomenon is known as entropy: the natural tendency for things to go from a state of order to disorder. You can always hire a maid to clean your house and you can take your car to a mechanic. But what about your computer?

When you first bought it, everything worked blazingly fast. It booted up quickly and the programs were snappy and responsive. But lately, you’ve noticed that things have slowed down and now, whenever you try to get something done, it seems to take forever.

Iolo technologies’ System Mechanic 10 is the first PC performance software to address the root causes behind your system’s slowdown.

You’re not the first PC user to be confounded by this seemingly unexplainable PC slowdown, which occurs despite the fact that your hardware still runs as fast as the day you bought it. You’ve added more RAM, upgraded your hard drive and kept your system virus-free with reliable virus protection. And all the upgrades and updates you downloaded were supposed to make things better, yet your system has still slowed down.

This previously unexplainable phenomenon has been quantified and scientifically explained by iolo Labs as the Nine Root Causes of PC Slowdown. According to iolo Labs, these scientifically measured nine causes — which include excessive clutter, fragmentation, memory leaks, the newly discovered program misalignment and more — result in software slowing down over time.

System Mechanic 10, the newest version of iolo’s award-winning PC tune-up software, combines more than 50 tools including two key new performance features to address all nine causes and bring your PC back to its new, out-of-the-box speed: the new patent pending “Program Accelerator” and the new “CRUDD Remover.” Program Accelerator deals with “Program Misalignment” while CRUDD Remover solves the issue of unnecessary, redundant software.

Used to be that programs were just one big file. Over time, they would get fragmented and disk defragmenters would put them back together again. Today’s applications are no longer just one big file. They have hundreds of dependent files they need to access in order to work properly. But the disk defragmenters have not evolved to work with them.

When first loaded onto your hard drive, programs and their dependent files are usually located close together on the disk. But as time goes by, these dependent program files become misaligned and get scattered across the hard drive. This results in the hard drive working harder to retrieve these scattered files, which makes everything run slower.

This phenomenon is known as program misalignment, one of the newly identified nine root causes of PC slowdown. Program Accelerator uses a special calibration technology that addresses this problem by realigning all of a program’s dependent files as it defragments them. Simply put, the programs are put back together with all of their dependent files. It’s so unique that iolo has acquired a pending patent for the technology. The results are faster program launching and faster response.

The CRUDD (Commonly Redundant or Unnecessary Decelerators and Destabilizers) Remover deals with the redundant software problem. It identifies and classifies multiple programs that run the same functions, ranking their impact on the computer’s speed and stability in an easy-to-understand graphic representation. Users can then make an informed choice about which programs to keep and which ones to remove.

Iolo Labs research confirms that removing redundant software is one of the most effective ways to make a PC faster and more stable, yet no other product offers such an intelligent and simplified way to do it.

Finally, iolo is the first software maker to break the artificial and obsolete 3 PC barrier by introducing the Whole Home licensing program. Up till now, you could only license up to three PCs. But these days, a lot of families have more than three PCs at home — there’s one for Mom, Dad, each of the kids, and even one for Grandma. With Whole Home, all PCs in a single-family home are covered, making System Mechanic 10 the first software to address the 21st-century reality of modern households with multiple PCs.

System Mechanic 10 is automatically available at no charge to all existing users of System Mechanic with an active service plan, which provides constant access to Tune-up Definitions, as well as all product updates and upgrades. New or existing users without a service plan can purchase System Mechanic 10 directly from www.iolo.com, via all major Web e-tailers, or in one of more than 18,000 retail storefronts that carry iolo’s products worldwide. Don’t wait until you find yourself in the slow lane. Get System Mechanic Version 10 and get back on the fast track again.

For more information, visit http://www.iolo.com.

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the No. 1 daily national computer radio talk show, Computer America, heard on the Business TalkRadio Network and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network — Monday through Friday, 10 p.m.-midnight ET. For more information, visit his website at www.computeramerica.com.

2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services